A feud can be very tedious and tiring if you’re one of the combatants. But let’s be honest: for onlookers, feuds are fun. Videos of spats in which one or other party is ‘schooled, owned, destroyed’ ratchet up millions of views. It’s even more fun when both sides don’t lose their temper and civility is maintained. There is glorious entertainment in watching people ‘throwing shade’ at one another without it ever quite coming to the boil.
The smaller the differences, the funnier the feud
Now we have a new one to enjoy, in the classic mould. Ding ding, in the blue corner is Kemi Badenoch. While in the slightly different shade of blue corner it’s Nigel Farage. Rocking up to Kemi’s headquarters in the middle of the night with a projector displaying his membership numbers, Farage managed to goad Badenoch into a non-proofread thread on X, which in turn goaded him into making threats of legal action (or at least, threats of threats of legal action). It has all the snippy, snipy ingredients of the archetypal feud, replete with incidental comic detail, not least that it all happened during the season of goodwill.
What makes a good feud? Diametric opposition – Vidal and Buckley, Gladstone and Disraeli, Trump and Crooked Hillary – can be fun, yes. But I think the best feuds are the ones where the antagonists are supposedly closely aligned, and are trying to occupy exactly the same space, like angry atoms rubbing their way to a nuclear detonation. Tony Blair and Gordon Brown are the epitome of this.
We see much more of this type in fiction. In E.F. Benson’s Mapp and Lucia novels, both characters want to be top dog in the seaside town of Tilling. Benson adds to our enjoyment by having other characters revelling in the spectacle of the feud. Giovanni Guareschi’s tales of Don Camillo and Peppone are similarly small in the scheme of things. Yes, the two are political enemies – a priest and a communist agitator – but their vying for position is at the personal level, and they are both big, aggressive men with bully boy congregations. In Till Death Us Do Part, Alf Garnett and son-in-law Mike are both just loudmouth, old-fashioned boors. (It is often overlooked by modern viewers that lefty Mike is supposed to be pretty much as bad as right wing Alf.)
But the smaller the differences, the funnier the feud. 1980s ITV sitcom Never The Twain, the story of two antique dealers who live next door to each other and own adjacent shops selling pretty much the same thing but loudly protesting that the other is pushing tat, is perhaps the best model for Badenoch/Farage – I can almost hear the theme tune striking up when they have their little spats.
Farage has an advantage in that he’s never been in government in any role. While whatever Kemi says or does, she can never quite reach the Goldilocks zone. She is either portrayed as a woke culture war crusader or a right-wing reactionary. She is too stern, or too flippant. We complain that Starmer is a robotic blank but Kemi’s jokes, or at least comments made in jest, send the media piranha-barmy.
The Tories have a credibility problem, either way. Every furious tweet denouncing the state of the nation from Robert Jenrick is laughable – like a builder surveying his own work and shaking his head.
There’s been much talk of a new mega-poll that points to a hung parliament. But we’re only six months in to this terrible government. There’ll be many more polls, mega or otherwise. Who knows the devastation Labour will have wreaked by 2029?
Kemi is right that the Tories need a root and branch rebirth. It’s nice to know that just one of our knackered institutions is at least acknowledging that it needs a reboot.
Reforming our other institutions seems like building castles in the air. The practicalities of switching, as Farage has mooted, to a French-style model for healthcare, would require a military level of government precision and, like many such reforms, war against a civil service that would be militantly opposed to it. Genuine reform of the country would mean protracted battles on many fronts, tasks that require strategising at a micro and macro level. Whoever tries it, it will be a hell of a job. Even Mrs Thatcher, for example, never really went near the universities. At the very end of her reign I was starting a degree course that could be mildly described as seditious.
When the real disasters of Labour strike, not just figurative disasters but actual disasters, Badenoch and Farage – for all their feuding – may well have no choice but to unite. And surely, secretly, they both know this. If I’ve worked this out, sat here munching the dregs of the Quality Street tub and scrolling through X while watching Where Eagles Dare for the hundredth time, they must have too.
As inconceivable as it seems now, for Nigel and Kemi it may well come one day, to an ‘all is forgiven’ photo-op in the Downing Street garden. Today’s spats will be ancient history then. The projector and the Twitter thread, forgotten. From a purely personal viewpoint, because I like them both, I can’t wait.
What could 2025 hold for Kemi Badenoch and Nigel Farage? Katy Balls discusses with James Heale and Patrick Maguire on the latest Coffee House Shots podcast:
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