Don’t write off Kemi Badenoch

In the great game of musical chairs that is British politics, it’s impossible to foresee which contestant will be left with nowhere to sit when the music stops. Keir Starmer won a landslide victory last July, but has since behaved like a child who has allowed the excitement to go to his head. He agreed immediately to cut the universal winter fuel payment, which made the government look ready to risk short-term unpopularity in pursuit of serious long-term goals. Yet when the unpopularity arrived, he abandoned the measure and with it any claim to long-term thought. As a contributor to one of Lord Ashcroft’s focus groups said this week: ‘He made himself look bad doing it, but he’s made himself look even worse going back on it.’ Who now believes Rachel Reeves has what it takes to get a grip on public spending? But Starmer, who assures us he will always do what is in the national interest, has left Reeves in place.

Kemi Badenoch has been Tory leader only since November, yet already there are elements in the press that say she should go. The parliamentary lobby knows how to cover a Tory leadership crisis. It has had plenty of practice in recent years, but this exhilarating sport goes back through the fall of Thatcher in 1990, the collapse of Macmillan in 1963, the overthrow of Chamberlain in 1940 and the abandonment of Lloyd George in 1922 to the destruction of Peel in 1846.