It feels like being trapped inside a minor nightmare. You’re in a car which someone else is driving, in slow motion, and you can see that there’s a wall right in front of you, and that you will soon crash into it, but there’s nothing you can do about it. The car isn’t going so fast that you will suffer from life-altering injuries but still: it won’t be pleasant.
Helpless, you sit there and wait, for minutes that feel like weeks, and by the time the crash comes you don’t even feel smug for having predicted it, because surely anyone with eyes could have done so. Well, anyone with eyes, except from the person driving the car.
It was always obvious that Boris Johnson would fail as prime minister, and that he would do so because of his personal failings. He liked having a good time too much, was concerned with power above all else, had little discipline, and no interest in being a good manager. That proved to be his downfall, as it was always going to.
Liz Truss had mad ideas and refused to compromise; she was always going to crash and burn the moment her insane beliefs had to deal with reality. In the end, that’s exactly what happened, albeit perhaps even more quickly than most people had assumed.
Similarly, Rishi Sunak did take some pundits by surprise by having an even worse political compass than previously thought, but everyone knew that there was nothing he could have done anyway. The Conservatives were always going to lose the next election, and so he governed for a little while and then he lost the election.
Again and again, we got into the car, mostly against our will, and we waited for the crash to happen. It was, in a way, entirely maddening; nothing makes you feel quite as powerless as watching someone making a blatant mistake and being unable to do anything about it. It made you want to jump up and down and beg for them to stop, or at least fast-forward so we’d be spared all that useless build-up.
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Why is Kemi Badenoch so bad at politics?
On the bright side, Kemi Badenoch is currently driving straight into a wall, at that same, cripplingly slow pace, but we aren’t in the car with her this time. She’s in opposition, and her errors are her problem. That doesn’t mean that her many, many failings as Conservative leader are any less galling.
Badenoch is needlessly rude to journalists, meaning that she has already succeeded in alienating most of them. She doesn’t much care for or about her colleagues, which means her colleagues aren’t exactly lining up to defend her. She only talks about what she feels she ought to talk about, and no one is listening because that only works if you’re in government. She is quite lazy when not working on things that don’t interest her, which just isn’t an option in so gruelling a job.
In short: she’s an appalling leader of the opposition, as she was always going to be. There isn’t even a shred of surprise here: Badenoch doesn’t have a single one of the many qualities required to bring a party back from electoral oblivion, and into Downing Street. Still, we have to watch her fail, slowly, painfully, because that’s what the Tories specialise in, these days.
If it is madness to do the same thing and expect a different result, then you may as well throw them straight into the asylum. Like a sweet and naive teenage girl, the party keeps falling for the wrong guy then wondering why things keep going tits up. There is a world in which we should find it easy to point and laugh, especially as their mistakes no longer affect our lives in the same way, but it sadly isn’t this one.
The weaker the Tories become in opposition, the stronger Nigel Farage gets. Reform keeps climbing up in the polls and, though their increasing popularity has a number of root causes, the collapse of the Conservative Party clearly is the main one. There are many people in this country who will only ever vote for the right and, stripped of the obvious option, they’ll keep drifting towards the extremes instead.
This is why Badenoch’s blatant flaws aren’t even entertaining: in the end, her failures may yet doom us all. Who could have seen that coming?
