This may be more suited to a confessional than a newspaper column but I have a fascination with Kemi Badenoch that is becoming faintly absurd. As someone who has both a personal passion for and professional interest in British politics, I can’t quite believe the amount of time I spend responding to her every utterance and intervention by wondering whether I have, in fact, gone mad.

Whether policies, polls or performances, the gulf between the reality I think I inhabit and the world according to Kemi seems almost inconceivably enormous, and yet so complete is her belief in her own brilliance that I frequently find myself checking whether my own memory of events is accurate.

This, for example, is the politician who helpfully said of herself: “I never have gaffes… I never have to clarify because I think very carefully about what I say.” And yet she has subsequently insisted that “the last time I checked, Northern Ireland did vote to leave [the European Union]” (it did not); and she has had to clarify that when she said maternity pay was “excessive” she did not, in fact, mean that maternity pay was excessive.

Only today, the gaffe-free zone wrote an article for that described a new air defence system as being “modelled on Israel’s Iron Dome” – language that echoed a press release announcing the policy issued by her own party. Before lunch, and shortly after she had explained to my LBC colleague Nick Ferrari that it was not her job to know anything about how the system would look or indeed function, she was denying she had ever made any comparison with Israel’s Iron Dome.

She blamed newspapers for the “confusion”, which reminded me that only last month she was condemning Reform UK’s decision to refuse accreditation to various journalists for their party conference, calling the decision “authoritarian” and insisting “We believe in free speech. We believe in a free press.” The respected journalists Adam Bienkov and Josiah Mortimer, currently refused accreditation for the Tory conference in Birmingham without any explanation, may well be joining me in wondering whether it is them or her who have lost touch with observable reality.

And at this Tory conference, approved journalists and other attendees have been treated to a parody-proof pastiche of the Bayeux Tapestry, lionising Badenoch and mocking her rivals. Perhaps the most ridiculed figure was her former leadership rival Robert Jenrick, now clinging to Nigel Farage’s rapidly disintegrating coat-tails. But had he stayed in the Conservative Party, he would presumably still be Badenoch’s shadow justice secretary and she would still be defending him for, inter alia, complaining about there being “no white faces” in Birmingham.

John Oxley has explained in The i Paper that the central thrust of Badenochism – or Kemistry as she, in not remotely cringeworthy fashion, prefers to call it – is to do everything that was done under the last three or four Tory governments (it’s hard to keep count) but somehow with more vigour or noise or, perhaps, Kommitment. More deregulation, more fossil fuels, more demonising of welfare claimants, more tax cuts for the comfortable, more promises to obliterate immigration etc etc.

It is as if she believes herself to be some sort of special sauce, capable of imbuing tired old burgers, recently rejected by the electorate, with new and irresistible flavour. She does, at least, understand burgers, explaining in 2024 that she “became working class” shortly after starting work at McDonald’s as a teenager.

And speaking of the electorate, while her personal approval ratings are healthy-ish – not a massive surprise considering much of the right-wing media seems to share her belief that she is a cross between Boudicca and Margaret Thatcher – the party she leads continues to languish at around or below the levels it secured when it handed Keir Starmer an enormous parliamentary majority.   

I could go on but, once again, a quick review of the available facts has reassured me that I have not, in fact, gone mad, and that it is Badenoch and her army of admirers who seem to occupy an alternative reality while talking dementedly of “Kemistry” – or even “Keminaissance”.

I can see only one major reason for this. Various media owners, secretive sponsors of tax-averse “think tanks” and climate change-denying plutocrats, who seem determined to see normal service resumed in Downing Street as soon as possible, are having serious doubts about Nigel Farage’s electability, and Badenoch remains their only other option.

The paucity of quality on her own front bench – more talent puddle than talent pool – makes replacement highly unlikely, so they have no choice but to big her up, trying to persuade themselves that she is not the politician she so patently is but rather the politician that they wish she was. It helps that by far the biggest believer in this delusion is Badenoch herself.

And all this introduces a rather hefty silver lining for Andy Burnham. An ego like Badenoch’s, and a following that increasingly borders on the Kultish (sorry), make the likelihood of any form of electoral pact with Farage, and all her former colleagues now in his party, vanishingly small. And so it is that her belief in her own hype may yet encourage the Prime Minister to call the early election that every Tory in Birmingham is convinced he is considering.