Newsletter #1: Kemi Badenoch meltdown
PLUS: Sue Gray resigns; Chagos Islands Contrarians Speak Out; and breaking our Israel-Palestine silence
Good morning.
Welcome to the very first edition of the Pimlico Journal newsletter, in which we will discuss day-to-day politics, unlike our ‘slow news’-focused main articles. There’s a lot to discuss this week, so let’s get right into it.
This newsletter’s agenda: Kemi Badenoch meltdown (free); Sue Gray is out, but don’t take your eye off her just yet (free); Chagos Islands Contrarians Speak Out (paid); Our main ‘partners’ in the Middle East are Jordan and the Gulf Arabs, not the Israelis (paid).
The first and second sections are free. Upgrade to a paid subscription — normally £8/month (or £80/year), but ten percent off for one year until the end of October, click here! — to read the third and fourth sections of this newsletter.
Kemi Badenoch meltdown
The Conservative leadership contest rumbles on. Rishi Sunak has done everyone a favour by disappearing almost completely (failing to even make much of a comment on the riots), and has, so far as we can tell, conspicuously chosen not to try to pick his successor. The total lack of a real Leader of the Opposition to attack has made Keir Starmer’s first few months even more dismal than they would have been otherwise, with the Labour Party’s endless vituperations against their now-invisible predecessors on X coming across as tin-eared to the public and failing to boost morale within the Party.
Kemi Badenoch, always gaffe-prone, brittle, lazy, vapid, media- and image-obsessed in the worst possible way, and — quite frankly — rather weird, is finally getting found out, at least by MPs. However, if she manages to slip through to the final round, polling (as well as past experience with Truss) suggests that she will stand a good chance against whoever she faces, as the Tory membership have not necessarily caught on just yet, and are similarly addicted to culture-warring nonsense. Mega-hawk Tom Tugendhat has kept up the fight, attempting to (rather unconvincingly) tack right. He faces a real challenge getting into the final round — but at least he’s trying!
The most likely final round is thus Robert Jenrick versus James Cleverly. Jenrick, who clearly has the momentum behind him, should be the favourite in this contest; that said, some polling (take with a grain of salt) suggests that a Jenrick-Cleverly race would be very close. Cleverly, while affable, doesn’t have much to him politically, let alone intellectually. His campaign has been low-profile compared to all of the other three remaining candidates. It has, however, received a last-minute boost in the media for little discernible reason, which I read as Badenoch supporters, realising she is a busted flush, attempting to rally around a new candidate. From the perspective of Conservative Party supporters, Jenrick is clearly the preferable choice; failing that, Tugendhat is probably slightly better than Cleverly (at least if he tones down his foreign policy blood-lust), but not by much. Badenoch would be the worst by a long, long way.
In our article ‘Seats to watch tonight’, we said that ‘much more will inevitably be said about Badenoch at a later date’. This is that date.
Badenoch’s collapse from clear frontrunner to being at risk of not making it to the final round may seem remarkable to some, but it has not come as a surprise for long-time ‘Kemi’-watchers like myself. (Without wishing to sound too much like Peter Hitchens, in my view we should always be suspicious of politicians who are mostly known by their first names.) If anything, I am surprised that she has maintained as much support from MPs as she has, given that her campaign has been a disaster from start to finish. She probably still has further to fall, both in this contest and as a politician more generally.
Badenoch is widely believed to be beloved ‘policy wonk’ Michael Gove’s candidate. This is strange given that until very recently, Badenoch’s campaign was almost policy-free, even when compared to the campaigns of Tugendhat and Cleverly (both of which spent most of the first few weeks reciting inanities about ‘leadership’, ‘decision’, ‘service’, and so on). Her launch video featured her picking a fight with Doctor Who, informing him that ‘she won’t shut up’. (Reportedly, her advisors told her this wasn’t a good idea, but Badenoch, narcissistic as ever, wouldn’t listen.) She also somewhat rudely tells someone that they’re saying her name wrong — or, more accurately, her husband’s name wrong. This is only made more annoying by the fact that her husband is actually on record saying that he doesn’t care whether you pronounce it ‘BAYdenoch’ or ‘BAAdenoch’, and that he considers both acceptable. More generally, even for a politician (an occupation that requires some degree of narcissism), it is mind-boggling just how much Badenoch talks about herself; everything is about ‘I’ and ‘me’ — once someone mentions this, you can’t stop noticing it — or her inherent (rather than acquired) personal characteristics. Nothing is external to her person.
The main thought that ‘Kemi’ — insightful as ever — has gifted the Conservative membership with is repeatedly telling everyone that the Conservative Party needs to get serious. She isn’t wrong, of course. But this is a surprising rhetorical stance for Kemi Badenoch, of all people, to take. After all, the three other candidates (yes, even Cleverly) are visibly much more ‘serious’ than Badenoch is. Perhaps she heard from her advisers that this was one of her weaknesses — that she was considered good on Woke, but not on Policy — but simply saying you’re ‘serious’ won’t convince anyone.
It seems reasonable for us to conclude that Badenoch believed she could only be harmed by making statements on policy, which is not her strong suit; instead, she thought, it would be better to let the other candidates fight it out among themselves, sail through to the final round, and then win the members on the basis that they’d heard good things about her sticking it to the Woke. This has clearly not worked. Instead, Jenrick has pulled her — and indeed all of the other candidates — into serious policy debates. For this, regardless of what you think of him personally, he must be praised.
Badenoch’s contributions on policy have not impressed, to say the least. On the ECHR, she has flip-flopped repeatedly, informing everyone that it is not a ‘silver bullet’. This is true: sufficient will on the part of the British government is also required. But that’s not an argument against leaving the ECHR: it’s an argument against complacency once we do it. She also called it an ‘easy answer’. True enough: it is an easy answer. But the easy answer is not always the wrong one.
For inexplicable reasons, she also decided to announce that she thought maternity pay in this country is ‘excessive’. Whatever the merits of this claim, it does not take much political nous to realise that hinting that you want to abolish (or dramatically scale back) statutory materinity leave is extremely unpopular. She soon rowed back from her comments, but the damage was already done. Even on something basic, like opposing the objectively ludicrous ‘social care’ visa, she managed to ruin it: in this case, by seeming to insult those working in care homes. Can she do anything right?
Most recently, Badenoch ‘joked’ that ten percent of Civil Servants should not just be laid off, but ‘in jail’, in a typically weird ‘Kemi’ moment. What’s even the point of saying things like this? She clearly has no plan for how to deal with the Civil Service, and as ever, talk is cheap: there’s no point ruining your relationship with the Civil Service from the start for effectively no reason; after all, if you win, and especially if you have no real plan, you will have to work with at least some of these people. (Inexplicably, rather than just calling Badenoch insane, Pat McFadden decided to really lay it on about how much the Labour Party love Civil Servants — I’d like to hear an update on this in a couple of years.)
In fact, Civil Servants already hated Badenoch — though for all the wrong reasons. It is amusing that The Guardian are running on a story of her ‘bullying’ them. Perhaps she did ‘bully’ some people, but this seems to have been the least of her problems as a minister. While I cannot give the specifics of what I have heard (as I don’t want to get anyone into trouble), in short: she was incapable of thinking for herself (to such an extent that it embarrassed Civil Servants, who generally are uncomfortable with formally telling ministers exactly what to do and what to say, word-for-word, rather than merely ‘advising’); was always late (‘…’); and never paid much attention to her ministerial tasks or briefings (instead spending her time either speaking to the media, cultivating her personal image, or on downright private matters). Similar observations of ‘Kemi’ were made by colleagues at The Spectator. And, belatedly, many Conservative MPs have started to notice these same things — though always obvious to those with eyes to see — as well.
Sensing that her campaign is collapsing — somehow, even her campaign stall at Party Conference was rubbish — Badenoch has began to intone darkly about how there must not be a ‘stitch-up’ to keep her out of the final two. We might ask: who is stitching such a fundamentally pro-establishment candidate up, other than herself? Ominously, if (or when) she loses, Badenoch seems to be gearing up for a years-long mega-tantrum from the backbenches, refusing whatever ministerial position that (most likely) Jenrick or Cleverly offers her; petty as ever, devoting herself to becoming a mighty pain in the arse for whoever wins. A kind of Ted Heath, but without the excuse of being a former Prime Minister brought low. My advice to the winner? Just don’t give her the oxygen.
Sue Gray is out, but don’t take your eye off her just yet
Sue Gray, after a months-long, very public feud with Starmer’s political guru Morgan McSweeney, has finally agreed to step down, much to the embarrassment of pro-Starmer talking heads who have expended a lot of energy defending her. One of the very last acts in office of Sue Gray’s nemesis Simon Case, the outgoing Cabinet Secretary — widely perceived by many in the Labour Party (and some in the Civil Service) to have ‘gone native’ under the Tories — was being sent to help negotiate the terms of Gray’s departure. For Gray, who until very recently must have felt she had gotten the better of Case, this must have stung.
More will be said of McSweeney, who has been elevated at Gray’s expense, at a later date — though we should briefly note that it seems dangerous to so directly reward the man who was clearly behind the public feuding that has derailed Starmer’s first few months, as this will surely encourage more behaviour of this type. Today, we will focus on Gray alone.
Many of the events that led to Gray’s departure have already been discussed in a previous article. Since this article was published, it was revealed that Gray demanded — and got — a salary higher than the Prime Minister, and that she (bizarrely) rejected reducing her salary by just a few thousand pounds to avoid the negative headlines this would inevitably cause. Unhelpfully, this news came out at the same time as many junior staff were grumbling about their pay, which Gray was perceived as being responsible for squeezing or cutting. There was also no progress on hiring Keir Starmer’s Principal Private Secretary, one of the most important positions in Government, with Gray continuing to back Daniel Gieve, who many Labour politicians thought to be politically unreliable. Since her departure, some pro-Starmer writers have bemoaned the power of Britain’s hostile media. Others, such as Blairite hagiographer John Rentoul, seem to have gone as far as claiming that Gray was merely a Trojan Horse sent by the Tories to disrupt Starmer’s Government. And they say that only the Right are conspiracy theorists!
We must now ask the question: what was Gray even hired for in the first place? The evident lack of any real ‘plan’ from Gray seems to undermine the idea that she was merely poached by Starmer for her policy and/or administrative expertise — nothing more and nothing less — and gives a boost to more cynical, even conspiratorial interpretations of the events of Partygate. While it is difficult to work out which of the many, many unpopular policies claimed by ‘internal sources’ to originate from Gray can can actually be laid at her feet, it seems reasonable enough to think that at least some of them really were her fault. All Gray seems to have done is create massive internal dysfunction, both due to in-fighting and due to her own managerial ineptitude, over-centralising all decisions around her and a tiny, impermeable inner circle, while demoralising and alienating everyone else. But for now, claims of a political stitch-up by Gray in Partygate remain somewhat speculative.
It is widely rumoured that Gray will be given a peerage, and alongside it, a new role: ‘envoy for the regions and nations’. It is unclear what this role will entail. There are two interpretations of this. The first is that this was a role virtually made up on the spot, invented purely to try and allow Gray to save face. The second — and more concerning — interpretation is that this is a genuine role for Gray, from which she will continue to pursue her murky agenda in Northern Ireland.
There are many unanswered questions as to Gray’s connections in Northern Ireland. She reportedly made ‘promises’ to unnamed groups out there that she would get Casement Park redeveloped at the cost of hundreds of millions. What will she be doing in Ulster, or indeed the rest of our ‘regions and nations’, now? Her history suggests that we are right to be worried. And, better yet from her perspective, she will now be able to pursue this agenda with far less attention from the prying eyes of the currently deeply bored and perversely hostile British media. Perhaps she might come to realise there are some benefits to her being forced out. Don’t take your eye off Gray just yet.
Chagos Islands Contrarians Speak Out
After many rounds of negotiations — mostly, it should be noted, under the Tories, though the buck ultimately stops with David Lammy — we have agreed to sign away the British Indian Ocean Territory — including Diego Garcia, home to an important base — to Mauritius. Goodbye, Magic Turtle Kingdom…
Currently, all involved have been attempting to pass the blame onto others. Lammy blames Cleverly, who blames Truss, and so on. The announcement has undeniably somewhat harmed Cleverly in the leadership election. From the outside, it seems that what happened is that Cleverly put Britain in a weak position; Cameron somewhat escaped it; and, mostly for ideological reasons, Lammy decided to sign the islands away anyway.
Soon after the announcement, my co-editor put out a tweet which made fun of those right-wingers who were up in arms about the decision. This earned us attacks from fellow right-wingers as ‘contrarians’ and ‘nihilists’. I think we have some explaining to do. (For those unfamiliar, this man is meant to symbolise the ‘Boring Right’ — the sort of person who loudly declares that he wants to declare war on FRANCE (‘HEAR, HEAR!’) at a Birmingham University Conservative Association Port and Policy meeting.)
There are two levels of analysis here: first, the decision itself; and second, the reaction to the decision on the Right.
Let us begin with the first. On this, I think almost all readers will agree with me. Objectively, it is true to say that Britain capitulated for no real reason, and gave away valuable territory — not necessarily territory directly valuable to Britain itself, but valuable to other countries (i.e., the United States and, potentially, China) — for nothing.
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