Everybody knows that there is a lot of pressure on Andy Burnham, whose honeymoon period as Prime Minister must surely be at least approaching the departure lounge. But why is there none on Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch?
Burnham is the only available antidote to Britain’s post-Brexit populist paroxysms and his predecessor provided an object lesson in how hard it is these days for a Labour Prime Minister to recover from early missteps and mistakes.
The post-war order is reeling under the influence of Donald Trump’s self-enriching cocktail of absurdity and obscenity while, at home, the sense that political wildfires will break out next time Reform UK leader Nigel Farage decides to weaponise a crime by a person of colour will sustain long after this year’s season of actual wildfires has passed.
From health to defence, social care to young people not in education, employment, or training (NEETs), the country faces deep and abiding problems that can only be meaningfully addressed, never mind alleviated or solved, with substance, realism and determination. This is, in other words, a period that demands political seriousness, proper scrutiny and, therefore, effective and intelligent opposition. The sharpness of Burnham’s premiership will in many ways be defined by the whetstone of substantive opposition.
And thanks to Badenoch, he currently doesn’t have any. Farage is, and always has been, ridiculous and dangerous in equal measure. Secretly trousering oodles of cash from a foreign-based billionaire, apparently inventing a police warning to stay away from his own by-election victory announcement in Clacton, prioritising his own ego and gossamer-thin skin over any semblance of party unity or cogent policy, every week brings his singular awfulness further into focus.
But Farage is not the leader of the opposition. Reform only has eight MPs, and only three of them were elected on the party’s ticket at the last general election. You might not know it from the way broadcasters fall over themselves to send cameras every time he, Lee Anderson or Richard Tice draw breath, but they are not a serious party. Their policies, as we saw this week with unworkable announcements about welfare and disability claimants, and last week with an immigration “policy” plucked wholesale from the worst of radio phone-in callers (and I would know!), are at best fanciful, at worst downright stupid.
Badenoch’s recent headlines, meanwhile, have drawn voters’ attention to the fact that there is room on her candidate lists for an allegedly reformed former neo-Nazi, jailed for inciting racial hatred against Jews, but reportedly not room for Grant Shapps, a former party co-chairman who held a plethora of ministerial positions in the last four Conservative governments. The former, Joshua Bonehill-Paine, subsequently removed himself from consideration for a council seat in Somerset and was immediately parachuted by Kemi “I’ve never had a gaffe” Badenoch into an advisory role.
It takes a special kind of incompetence to engender feelings of sympathy for Grant Shapps, or whatever name he’s going by this week, but it doesn’t end there. Dame Penny Mordaunt, a former defence secretary, is among a cohort of Tories with lengthy and varied experience of government still waiting to learn whether their support for policies pursued by Tory governments going back to former prime minister David Cameron and beyond will bar them from standing for the current iteration of their party. Badenoch herself, of course, also campaigned on manifestos calling for net zero and membership of the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR), but perhaps she has forgotten. Or did so by accident. Or didn’t mean it.
In May, she was forced to apologise after footage of soldiers on Bloody Sunday was posted to her social media account. It is not clear whether she knew that the civil rights protesters shot dead or injured by British troops that day were found by the 2010 Saville Inquiry to have done nothing to justify the shooting. Or that Cameron, himself presumably persona non grata in Badenoch’s Conservatives due to his support for those pesky net zero and ECHR policies, described the killings as “unjustified and unjustifiable”.
In February, she was quick to “stand with our allies in the US and Israel as they take on the threat of the Islamic Republic of Iran and its vile regime” and insist that Sir Keir Starmer should have done more to support the doomed war. Weeks later, as the idiocy of the intervention became impossible for even her to ignore, a graceless reverse ferret was executed: “I said that we support their actions. I never said we should join.”
Presumably, her position here has changed yet again but we are unlikely to find out because Tory-supporting media continues to insist that a so-called “Keminaissance” is under way. That despite objectively humiliating results in Makerfield and the Manchester mayoral elections, she is somehow presiding over a transformation of Tory fortunes, while the party’s polling remains lower than it was when they were trounced by Starmer’s Labour in the 2024 election.
Tragically, but no longer hilariously, it is an exercise in delusion and denial best exemplified by Badenoch herself, who appears to absolutely believe that she is some sort of cross between Boudicca and former prime minister Margaret Thatcher. “You are a serious person who does big things,” was one of the motivational messages to herself found in a notebook that claimed last year she accidentally left in a hotel room at The Dorchester.
Well, I wish she’d start soon because otherwise Andy Burnham will be charged with single-handedly steering the country back to the grown-up politics it so desperately needs. And he’s got plenty on his plate already.