Newsletter #23: Is Kemi Badenoch's media firewall on its last legs?

PLUS: Are the delayed local elections a blessing in disguise for Reform?

Good morning.

Will Pimlico Journal find itself vindicated? Were we just ahead of the curve, yet again, on Kemi Badenoch? I don’t want to look too smug, but it seems that Kemi’s media firewall is on its last legs.

This newsletter’s agenda: Kemi Badenoch loses Guido Fawkes following abysmal PMQs performance (free); Kemi has a (good) policy! (paid); Delayed local elections: a blessing in disguise for Reform (paid); Downgrade your assumptions on a Reform-Tory pact (paid); Why did the Bank of England cut rates? (paid)

Kemi Badenoch loses Guido Fawkes following abysmal PMQs performance

It has been pretty lonely for us at Pimlico Journal, being sceptical of Kemi Badenoch (to say the least) for so long. Until recently, with the notable exception of The Critic, almost all vaguely mainstream right-of-centre outlets were uniformly pro-Badenoch in their coverage. Slowly but surely, however, we are being vindicated; more and more are joining our team. It should be clear for all to see that, no, Kemi Badenoch was not the right person to lead the Conservative Party through the most challenging time in their entire history.

The week kicked off with two more anti-Badenoch pieces, the first entitled ‘Where are the Tories?’, the second ‘Badenoch Must Go’, both from our allies at The Critic.

The first was written by The Critic’s editor, C.D. Montgomery. Most of it was just him complaining (not wrongly) about Badenoch’s bizarre absence over the Chagos Islands. But it also drew attention to a ‘CCHQ Source’, who told him that she dressed down CCHQ. This, apparently, didn’t go down well because many staff think she’s lazy herself (what else is new?), and the good staff resented being lumped in with the useless.

The second, written by a ‘senior source’ (who knows), mostly just repeats boilerplate criticisms of Badenoch from the Jenrick camp. There were, however, a few interesting tidbits from the inside of CCHQ:

CCHQ has been so badly run that they’re incapable of renewing the lease at Matthew Parker Street. This is symbolic of an organisation that has completely collapsed — well before her time, and not something I assign any blame to her for. But keeping the building requires donors, who she is terrible at dealing with; at the latest event she turned up late, left early and forgot to ask for any money. Her answer to getting the operation back on track is an all-staff meeting to say they “must do better”. This is wrong on three levels; first, the hard-working will resent being lumped in with the lazy; secondly, the lazy won’t respond to a pep talk; thirdly, everyone will resent being blamed for your lack of cut-through, particularly given you are so well-known for being lazy.

…

Kemi’s aggressive personal style means, I suspect, that she has never been corrected at work by colleagues. She probably believes that she doesn’t make gaffes; she probably believes she is some preternatural talent who simply does politics better because she is better. On both counts, she is wrong. She has been manoeuvred into place by boomers who love hearing their opinions said back to them by a woman of colour to prove they’re not racist, by the last Cameronites desperate to argue the left are the real racists and see if it works this time.

So… is CCHQ bankrupt? There have been rumours that they’re running out of money from some time now; in fact, I was hearing them even before the 2024 General Election. According to The Times, they have cut staffing by three-quarters since the General Election, and have considered closing their Leeds headquarters completely. But the most salacious rumour, as outlined above, is that they can no longer afford to pay the rent on the building they’re in. Predictably, Reform UK have been having their fun with this — Zia Yusuf asked on X whether they should move in, or if they should avoid it because it’s ‘cursed’. It is rather weird to me that the world’s oldest political party doesn’t own its own building. Surely someone, somewhere, at some point should have considered whether this might have been a good contingency plan if everything went wrong financially?

But more importantly, Kemi Badenoch was also subject to a scathing piece in Guido Fawkes. Guido Fawkes is certainly not The Spectator: it’s published plenty of negative pieces on Badenoch before. But nor is it The Critic. As such, the piece came as a surprise. It is almost certainly the most negative piece on Badenoch published by a reasonably mainstream right-of-centre news outlet that is not The Critic. The media firewall is on its last legs. Cracks are beginning to form.

The immediate trigger for this was Kemi Badenoch’s poor performance at Prime Minister’s Questions. After asking one question on the Chagos Islands, she then decided to ask six questions, in a row, on the oil and gas industry. Not exactly the most obvious topic, as important as it is, given that PMQs are obviously just political theatre, not a serious venue for policy debate. Guido Fawkes writes:

The Tories achieved an unquantifiable percentage increase in questions on the Order Paper over last week (from none to two). [And one of these two questions was used to ask about the ‘three dads walking’ campaign (me neither), for some reason.] If this reflects the number of questions they put into the ballot they are even more demoralised than they were in July.

Is it possible they are sparing themselves the embarrassment of their leader’s weekly appearance? That’s the charitable interpretation.

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What are Tories to do?

If they had any sense of loyalty to the conservative cause, half of them would defect to the Lib Dems and the other half to Reform. Kemi’s Conservatives probably deserve no less and no more.

…

Panic is moving from the sketchwriting fringe to broadsheet op-eds. There is such turmoil coming up in the UK, the Tiber foaming with such blood. We’ll be looking back in a few years and see Trump’s rule over America as a paradigm of sure-footedness, commonsense and effective statecraft.

Even the ever-optimistic Fraser Nelson, writing for The Times, is getting a little bit worried. While noting that ‘every effective conservative opposition leader… was initially seen as useless’, and seeming to give support for Kemi’s general strategy of ‘thinking’, rather than ‘fighting’, he admits that

…the problem is she has two opponents. Not just in parliament, but in a changing digital media arena where the debate is moving in new directions. Farage has emerged as the first party leader in the democratic world to have his own television show. The rise of GB News, Substack and Elon Musk’s X has made the debate angrier, more emphatic and faster-moving. Many voices on the digital right are already declaring Badenoch to be lazy or useless. One senior Tory has written, anonymously, that she has already failed.

Unfortunately, when all is said and done, Nelson has little advice for Badenoch — beyond hoping that ‘Reform [will] get so carried away in the digital mêlée that it will create a haze of contradictions, allowing the reformed Tories to say they are the party of answers and Reform the party of anger’. Cautioning against a pact — apparently, Jenrick is already being called ‘Nigel’s Chancellor’, and not in a good way (because apparently this is absurd) by his Shadow Cabinet colleagues — he concludes that

…Badenoch’s main weapon… [is] not that her plan will be an obvious success. But because, even with Reform riding so high in the polls, her party still has no credible alternative.

Not exactly the most encouraging comment.

Kemi has a (good) policy!