Slightly childish and she didn’t win. That’s how Kemi Badenoch fared during her first bust-up with Sir Keir Starmer at PMQs. She began with a snippy reaction to his gag about the Tory party’s penchant for changing its commander-in-chief. Sir Keir said that Kemi was the fourth leader he’d faced in less than five years. She took this personally.
‘Thank you for that almost warm welcome,’ she carped. She then quoted David Lammy’s comment about Donald Trump. ‘A neo-Nazi woman-hating sociopath,’ Lammy had said, before his promotion to foreign secretary. She asked Sir Keir to apologise. An easy question to duck and Sir Keir took the opportunity to pose as an international power broker. He said that he and Lammy had recently joined Trump for a statesmanlike dinner where they discussed matters of global significance.
She’d be better off as a gossip columnist than as a front-line politician
Kemi fired back by asking if Trump had thanked Sir Keir for sending crowds of ‘north London Labour activists’ to campaign against him. She left that hanging in the air and moved to Labour’s reputation for ‘student politics.’ She recalled that during Trump’s first presidency, Labour MPs signed a petition preventing him from addressing parliament. She called on Sir Keir to invite Trump to visit parliament ‘during his next visit.’
Sir Keir flung the insult back at her. ‘A masterclass in student politics,’ he quipped. She responded by accusing him of avoiding questions and ‘just reading the lines the officials have written for him.’ This attack felt over-rehearsed.
‘If she’s going to complain about scripted answers,’ said Sir Keir, ‘it’s probably best not to read that from a script.’ Good point. Well made. No comeback from Kemi.
She retorted that he was all ‘chat, chat, chat’ and that he couldn’t build our alliance with America. Then she fell apart completely. On defence spending, she claimed that the Chancellor hadn’t mentioned the topic in last week’s budget. What? Rachel Reeves went into more than enough detail. And she made it clear that she wants to spend like a drunken pirate. She committed 2.5 percent of Britain’s GDP to Nato and she announced an extra £3 billion a year to fund our proxy war against Russia. Did Kemi not hear these pledges being made in the house last Wednesday? Perhaps she’s being advised by a sixth-form politics student who started work this morning.
Sir Keir was so surprised by her blunder that he didn’t exploit it immediately. That was her only stroke of luck today. She sharpened her claws once again and urged Sir Keir to ‘change course’ or risk becoming ‘a one-term leader.’
Kemi evidently has a knack for personal invective but her grasp of policy seems shaky. She’d be better off as a gossip columnist than as a front-line politician.
She was grandly patronised by Sir Ed Davey of the Lib Dems, who stood up and beamed at her like a bishop handing a silver sixpence to a chimney sweep. He congratulated her on becoming the Tories’ first black female leader, as if being female and black were disabilities that Kemi had heroically overcome.
Sir Ed used his questions to flaunt his credentials as a world trade expert. But he doesn’t know how negotiations work. Trump has talked about levying duties on imports from Europe and Sir Ed took his words at face value. He can’t see that threatening tariffs is not the same as imposing them. In any case, Sir Ed regards Trump’s rhetoric as an opportunity to reverse Brexit. He urged Sir Keir to ‘get rid of the damaging trade barriers with Europe put in place by the Conservatives’. (This type of corruption is known in America as ‘democracy between elections.’) Then Sir Ed took aim at Trump’s future defence policy. He criticised the president-elect for praising Putin as ‘a genius’ and for encouraging him to ‘do whatever the hell he likes.’ Once again, Trump is exaggerating for effect and not articulating policy positions. Sir Ed finished by denouncing Trump as ‘a huge threat to national security in the United Kingdom.’ Crikey. Sir Ed sounds as if he’s ready to declare war on the United States. Hopefully, it’s just sabre-rattling. But with the Lib Dems, you never know.
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