The Speaker of the House of Commons has just given Kemi Badenoch a furious dressing down over the government’s u-turn on repealing retained EU laws. Lindsay Hoyle criticised the minister for using a written ministerial statement to sneak out the admission that the government will only be reviewing or repealing 600 laws by the end of the year, rather than 2,400 as promised by Rishi Sunak in his leadership campaign.
When Badenoch came to answer the question, she apologised rather dismissively ‘that the method we chose was not to your satisfaction’. Hoyle exploded, insisting ‘that is totally not acceptable: who do you think you’re speaking to?’
He told Badenoch that he was the ‘defender of this House’ and that he would not be ‘spoken to by a Secretary of State who is not accepting my ruling’. Badenoch apologised.
Badenoch was answering an urgent question tabled by veteran Eurosceptic and chair of the European Scrutiny Committee Bill Cash. Her argument was that ‘the 600 pieces of legislation in the schedule are not the limit of our ambition – neither the beginning not the end – but over the past year, as Whitehall departments have been working hard to identify retained EU law to preserve, reform or revoke, it has become clear that time constraints have led to the programme becoming more about preserving EU laws than prioritising meaningful reform’. The government, she said, was ‘proposing a new approach’. In other words, it had all got stuck in the mud and ministers needed to shake things up.
Cash wasn’t happy, not just with this explanation, but with the minister’s failure to come before his committee despite three separate invitations to do so. He wanted her to defer the report stage of the EU Retained Law Bill in the Lords ‘so that she can come to the European Scrutiny Committee next week and answer our questions – as provided for by Standing Orders – and produce a Command Paper before that Report Stage to explain the reasons for these fundamental questions of constitutional importance’.
Unsurprisingly, Badenoch did not make that commitment, instead talking about the number of times she and Cash had spoken about these reforms. Other Brexiteer MPs were more aggressive: Mark Francois complained that no one in the Conservative party had voted against the Bill – turning to deal with a heckle from Bob Neill, who abstained, to say: ‘No-one voted against it, Bob. Not even you.’ He asked Badenoch, ‘What on earth are you playing at?’
Badenoch was as cool under fire as she ever is, but she will know that the ire of the Brexit wing of her party is not something to dismiss with even a tenth of the attitude she showed towards the Speaker today. The European Research Group of Tory MPs is hugely dismissed from the days of the Brexit votes, and couldn’t even whip its members on a position on the Windsor Framework.
But its members remain a potent force in Conservative politics: just look at the fact that Suella Braverman returned to the Home Office in exchange for her support for Rishi Sunak in the second Tory leadership contest. The two agreed on very little, but Sunak knew that Braverman was key to getting those of the ERG tendency on his side.
Badenoch is often talked up as the next leader of the Tory party; she will have to work out a way of talking down the Brexiteers who are currently very angry with her.
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