From Badenoch to worse

A look at how the press is responding to the election of the new Tory leader. And yes, the T-word comes up a lot...

I’m sorry for the recent gap in output here. I was finishing the next round of edits on my book which is out next year. There’ll be a much more frequent flow of editions through November and onto the end of the year. There’ll be lots to say about US election coverage this week. Thanks for sticking with me.

---

Inevitably, the weirdest response to Kemi Badenoch’s election as leader of the Tory Party and, therefore, leader of the opposition, came from The Daily Telegraph. “Mummy won!” declared Tim Stanley in the opening to a stomach-churning sketch. The Freudian stuff made a return near the end of the piece when Stanley, in a real ‘speak for yourself’ moment, claims:

Kemi is too confrontational, said a few, too aggressive with the media. They don't realise that most male journalists rather like that, that we're still little boys seeing how far we can wind up mummy before she gives us a smack. 

Tim Stanley is 42 years old.

The piece’s conclusion offers a preview of the five years of feverish fan fiction we’ll now be subjected to by the right-wing press:

I left the hotel as happy as Philip Larkin upon the election of Margaret Thatcher, who wrote: "At last politics makes sense to me." After years of the parties copying each other, now we have a loopy Left government run by a vicar opposite a Tory party run by a right-wing dynamo. Never mind "do the Tories need her?", the country needs her. 

Elsewhere in the Telegraph, the Thatcher comparison was also hammered by Kamal Ahmed in a column headlined, ‘Badenoch vs Starmer – at last a proper political battle’:

Mark Twain said that “history never repeats itself, but it often rhymes”. It would be stretching historical parallels too far to say that Kemi Badenoch is the next Margaret Thatcher. As the Conservative MP Alex Berghart put it, speaking to The Daily T podcast: “She’s the first Kemi Badenoch”.

But there are rhymes in abundance which the new leader of the Conservatives should note.

Badenoch is up against a Labour government that believes in tax, spend and borrow – as Thatcher was.

Inevitably, the Telegraph also finds a way to make a woman’s win about a man with a profile of Badenoch’s husband Hamish “the banker who sacrificed his political career to back wife” and guess what? He’s compared to Thatcher’s husband Denis:

Like Mr Thatcher, Hamish Badenoch would regularly give his future wife a lift to and from meetings in his car as Denis did when a young Margaret Roberts was campaigning unsuccessfully in Dartford in 1950 and 1951.

The most over-excited Thatcher revivalism came from Simon Heffer in a breathless piece headlined No Tory has ever reminded me more of Mrs Thatcher than Mrs Badenoch. He writes:

Mrs Badenoch is the politician who most reminds me of Mrs Thatcher since I last saw Mrs Thatcher. She is hard-minded, deeply principled, and has Mrs Thatcher’s vital grasp of what Rab Butler (one of Mrs Badenoch’s predecessors as MP for Saffron Walden) called “the art of the possible”. That does not mean she would compromise on her conservatism, any more than Mrs Thatcher did; it means she will win her victories over years and not months, as Mrs Thatcher did, and they will be more enduring and profound as a consequence.

Later in that article, Heffer claims with obvious relish that he thinks Enoch Powell would have voted for Badenoch.

While the paper’s leader column claimed that Badenoch is “a breath of fresh air”, it also reached for dusty 80s comparisons:

… Ms Badenoch can take inspiration from history. In 1974, Margaret Thatcher faced a similar crisis: a Labour government hostile to private enterprise, attempting to spend its way out of trouble, and a conservative movement in dire need of a guiding philosophy and a plan to change the country for the better. The party today needs its version of the “Stepping Stones” report; an agenda for addressing the social and economic ailments afflicting Britain, giving the party its intellectual footing as it develops its manifesto.

Over at The Times, the leader writers avoided the temptation to talk to Thatcher and hedged their bets calling Badenoch “a calculated risk”:

Leaders of opposition parties sometimes struggle to have their voices heard; Ms Badenoch will not.

To play to this strength, however, she must become self-disciplined. She is too gaffe-prone. Her heavy-handed public interventions are not always informed by a wider sense of strategy. At her party’s recent conference, she unsettled her allies with impromptu remarks about the excesses of statutory maternity pay and her tongue-in-cheek view that 10 per cent of civil servants should be in jail. Such scattergun tactics fail to discriminate between important and less important targets. She must now pick her battles with more care.

The Sunday Times profile of Badenoch also managed to keep the Thatcher chat to a minimum with just one mention in a quote from an unnamed ally (“She talks about growing up as a little girl in Nigeria, which has a more misogynistic culture. Boys would say, ‘Why do you like maths and science, get back in the kitchen’ and Kemi would say, ‘Look at Margaret Thatcher — women can be strong and powerful too.’”) It’s one of those anecdotes that sound as though they were generated entirely by an AI trained on focus group responses.

Like the leader column, the profile mixes praise with caution. There are tales of her seemingly doing very little when she worked at The Spectator — a former colleague is quoted calling her “the queen of dysfunction” — and references to “stories about [her] brusqueness, poor time-keeping and laziness” during her time as a minister but also plenty of anecdotes about her “wowing” party members.

Inevitably, The Spectator, now edited by Michael Gove who backed Badenoch in her previous run for Tory leader, lurches straight for the Thatcher comparison — Is Kemi Badenoch the new Mrs Thatcher? And BBC News’ profile of Badenoch opens like this:

Like her political heroine Margaret Thatcher, Kemi Badenoch - who is the new Conservative leader - divides opinion even within her own party.

The Observer swerved a traditional profile in favour of asking five people who know Badenoch what they make of her. The quintet of anonymous voices is made up of a former ministerial colleague (“…policy-wise and politically, she’s a very difficult choice to understand the party making.”), a non-Tory friend (“She also never says thank you…”), a former Tory special advisor (“She’s divisive, lazy and antagonistic.”), a fellow MP and friend (“It’s going to be entertaining.”) and a Tory MP who backed her (“What you see is very much what you get.”)

In a Guardian column today, Nesrine Malik offers more direct criticism:

This is the woman who said that “not all cultures are equally valid”, when deciding on who is to be allowed to enter the UK. Who said that autistic people undeservingly receive “better treatment” and economic “privileges and protections”. Who thinks that maternity pay is “excessive”. That online safety regulation is “legislating for hurt feelings” and that net zero commitments are “unilateral economic disarmament”. And who has dedicated much of her career so far to pugnacious culture warring.

And if you were to just take a glance at what her elevation means to the ethnic minority from which she comes, I am afraid that there is not only little to celebrate, but a lot to worry about. Take Badenoch on colonialism (she doesn’t care about it); on Black communities (she thinks no such thing exists, a neat echo of Thatcher’s “no such thing as society”); and on racism (when Black people are in the wrong job, in her experience, they just think their employer is racist).

It’s a welcome corrective to the selective amnesia that seems to have afflicted a large swathe of the British press since Badenoch’s election. Malik’s conclusion is punchy:

Badenoch has the right to have whatever opinions she wishes, but it is also the right of others to feel excluded by them, and not be scolded for refusing to cheer an appointment that is at best meaningless, and at worst perturbing.

As we face the threat of drowning in new Thatcher fan fiction, Malik offers a life raft of reality to clamber onto. There’s a high chance that such blunt assessments of Badenoch will be extremely rare for some time to come.

---

Please share this edition if you enjoyed it. It helps.

You can also follow me on Twitter, Threads, and BlueSky.

If you haven’t yet, please consider upgrading to a paid subscription.

It helps and allows me to spend more money on research and reporting (of which more is coming). Buy a t-shirt if you’d like to make a one-off contribution and get a t-shirt.

.