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16 hours ago
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Last weekend the Daily Mail ran a front-page story about the imminent demise of Keir Starmer. A few days on and it’s increasingly looking like Kemi Badenoch whose job may be on the line. Just take a look at the faces of her backbench MPs at prime minister’s questions. Faces taut. Wishing they were somewhere else. Not a smile in sight.
What’s more, they know they have no one to blame but themselves. KemiKaze hasn’t changed. She hasn’t got the top job by false pretences. She’s always been primarily a culture warrior. A fundamentally unserious politician. Someone who bounces around in her own echo chamber until she collides with a piece of political opportunism.
For reasons they can no longer recall, Tory MPs imagined this made her an ideal leader. Maybe they just wanted a change. Maybe they were all suffering PTSD after their disastrous election result. Maybe they were seduced by someone who could sound delirious. An ersatz Nigel Farage.
But a few months in and reality is setting in. Kemi is not the messiah. She’s just a liability. An empty vessel with nothing better to do than follow up tweets posted by a far-right billionaire strung out on ketamine. A man with no real interest in child grooming gangs. Just someone indulging his own megalomania as he enjoys watching foreign politicians crawl up his bum. Politics has seldom felt more depressing.
There were a number of topics on which KemiKaze could have led on at PMQs. Tulip Siddiq’s questionable family business affairs. The state of the economy with borrowing costs likely to rise. Both of these represented areas of real danger for Starmer. Instead, inevitably, she devoted all six questions to calls for a national inquiry into child sexual abuse. A subject to which she hadn’t devoted a moment’s thought until the Muskster started tweeting about it during a drug-induced delirium.
Equally predictably, Starmer came through unscathed while Badenoch merely added to her reputation for misjudgment. She is blind to the bigger picture and can’t avoid a Pavlovian response when Elon comes ringing. There is no thought that Keir might actually be the one with the credible story to tell. That he, more than anyone, as head of the Crown Prosecution Service secured the convictions of countless rapists.
Nor was he actively ruling an inquiry out. Just saying what every other interested party, including Alexis Jay and Andrew Norfolk, was saying. That the time would be better spent implementing the recommendations of the previous inquiry rather than taking another seven years to find out what most of us already knew. Hell, we only knew there had been grooming gangs in so many towns because Starmer had opened the way for them to be prosecuted.
As for Kemi, she had nothing to add. She wanted a national inquiry because … she wanted a national inquiry. She thought it played well with the Tory right. Nothing to do with the victims and the survivors. Starmer invited her to list the occasions when she had spoken out about child grooming gangs while her party had been in government. Because he had been looking through the records and couldn’t find a single occasion.
“Er… As a minister, I would not have been speaking on this specific issue,” KemiKaze replied defensively. Which was odd. Because I can distinctly remember her having been a minister for children and families. Safeguarding was in her brief. And yet before last week she and the Tories had barely given grooming gangs a second thought. Implementing the recommendations of the Jay inquiry had never made it beyond the “to-do” list. This year, next year, sometime, never.
It was all shameless stuff. And Kemi and her frontbench team were without shame. The Tory leader oblivious to her own shortcomings while Chris Philp burdened her with a five-minute debrief in the latter half of PMQs. If you’re taking your cue from the Philpster, then you are officially screwed.
Still, it might have been worse. Badenoch could have consulted Andrew Griffith. The shadow business secretary had only that morning declared that Musk was humanity’s saviour. Just at the moment, the Tory shadow cabinet seemed to have cornered the market in stupidity. It’s getting crowded.
There was some sign of sentient life, though. And it came from an unexpected quarter as no one expects either intelligence or moral backbone from Laura Trott. Maybe, the bar has got so low that we have to take what we can get. In PMQs Starmer had begged the Tories not to kill the safeguarding elements of the children’s wellbeing and education bill by voting for their amendment calling for a national inquiry and it fell to the shadow education secretary to put the argument for the opposition.
Which she almost didn’t. Rather she spoke at length about all the things she felt were wrong with the bill itself. Unusually for the Tories, she was acting like a responsible opposition. You might not agree with her but she was trying to improve the legislation. It turned out Trott was only delaying the inevitable as she finally reached the bit about the amendment. She could hardly even bring herself to mention the inquiry. Her disgust was clear. The flirtation with populism had gone too far. She was amazed – as indeed we all were – to find she had some self-respect after all.
No such qualms for Nigel Farage. In the past few days the Reform leader has been on a bit of a journey. Finding himself to the left of the Tory party. So much so that he has been called out by the Muskster for sounding relatively sane. Now Nige was on a mission to reclaim the far right. To say the unsayable. To put this inquiry nonsense in its rightful context. This wasn’t just about the victims. It was about giving a voice to the far right.
What was needed was an inquiry to look at Pakistani men raping white girls, Farage said. Let’s unpick this. Some rapes are apparently more acceptable than others. No need for a specific inquiry into child sexual abuse in the church. No need to worry that a lot of sexual abuse is committed by family and friends of the victim. Maybe we could all live with that.
The Reform MP Rupert Lowe was not to be undone. Flying high after being singled out by Elon as his type of guy. If you happen to like guys who give golf club bores a bad name. Lowe went on to suggest that Pakistani men had committed millions of rapes. All visas to Pakistani men should be suspended. The cat was out of the bag. For some people, the grooming gangs had always been a race hustle.
