Kemi Badenoch has been accused of being an unpleasant bully who targeted civil servants for unconscionable treatment. The allegations – which Badenoch has strongly denied – centre around her time at the Department for Business and Trade and emerged in the Guardian. Pippa Crerar, who is exceptionally good at her job and is arguably now the most effective left-of-centre journalists in the country, was bylined on the story. When she was at the Daily Mirror, Crerar was a central mover in the bringing down of Boris Johnson via her relentless coverage of the ‘Partygate’ furore. But this latest story is not likely to result in a similar fate for the Badenoch, the Tory leadership favourite.
Some disagree. It is already being suggested that this latest salvo will damage Badenoch’s chances of winning the contest. If it does, then that can only be due to a significant number of Tory MPs being spineless idiots.
No Conservative MP should be responding to this story by descending into hysterical flap mode. In fact, the apparent targeting of Badenoch in stories such as this one should suggest to wise heads in the Tory party that she is the potential rival leader that the pro-Starmer left most fears.
This latest story is not likely to result in Badenoch being brought down
When Johnson was defenestrated in 2022 there was a thread on Twitter among right-leaning posters asking which potential Tory leader the Labour party would most fear at the next election (the one we have just had). Crerar intervened with a two-word answer: 'Boris Johnson'. This amounted to trolling of a most entertaining kind, taunting the right about how it had been brow-beaten into dumping the most consummate election campaigner of the age and clearing the way for a Labour ascendancy.
Grassroots Tory members are probably sensible enough to realise that if a frontbencher has got up the nose of leading lights in the left-leaning Civil Service 'blob' that is to be regarded more as a battle honour than a cause of consternation.
Given that Badenoch led the fight against the trans social contagion which has gripped elite metropolitan life over the past few years, she was always likely to be prime material for a hit job which appears to be based on gripes from mandarins whose sensibilities she so offended.
But are Conservative MPs in possession of similar reserves of common sense? Right now it is her 120 parliamentary colleagues who hold the fate of Badenoch’s leadership bid in their collective hands. She is in an increasingly tight-looking race with Robert Jenrick to become the right’s candidate in the last two of the contest. If just a few MPs jump across to Jenrick’s camp as a result of the 'Bullygate' furore then it could make all the difference.
And do not think, by the way, that there is no dossier of past embarrassments ready to be launched against Jenrick should Badenoch be knocked out and he become Labour’s potential ideological nemesis. It would follow as sure as night follows day.
As for the allegations against Badenoch that appeared in the Guardian, well they don’t really amount to a row of beans. Basically various civil servants in the business department dreaded being in meetings with her, with some 'reduced to tears afterwards on a handful of occasions'. There was a staff 'town hall meeting' in December at which about 70 civil servants shared 'concerns about the working culture'. At least three officials found her behaviour so traumatising that they felt they had no other choice but to leave, the paper reported. A spokesperson for Badenoch said the allegations were 'completely false'.
What is certainly true is that Badenoch has always been aware of the risk of ministers falling prey to 'capture' by the Civil Service and hence abandoning the conservative agendas they were supposed to be pursuing. It is also the case that she can be terse and has a reputation in the Commons for not suffering fools gladly, non-gladly or indeed at all.
Perhaps some of this is cultural – after all the driven Nigerian heritage mother who demands unceasing excellence on all fronts has become a modern social stereotype. If that is the case then, as youngsters say these days, 'I’m here for that'.
The notions that elite-level civil servants should be expected to deliver elite-level performance levels and that poor work should not go unchallenged do not seem to me to be ripe for redundancy. Conservatives should assess Badenoch on her actual merits and demerits, not according to how she scores on modern human resources claptrap metrics. If they do not, then more fool them.
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