Stephen Daisley on Kemi's reply to the King's Speech
Journalist Stephen Daisley wrote in the Telegraph that opposition leader Kemi Badenoch "has just shown what a real leader looks like" as she skewered of the government in the debate on the King'" s Speech:
"As Keir Starmer’s premiership circles the drain, with his colleagues desperately trying to flush away an election-winner they now regard as an embarrassment, it fell to Kemi Badenoch to tell the Prime Minister and his Government where they had gone wrong.
Emily Thornberry protested at being “lectured”, and indeed it was a lecture – a forensic and devastating analysis of a party that had 14 years to prepare for power but has run out of steam after only two.
In a sometimes humorous but mostly bracing response to the King’s Speech, the Conservative leader told the Prime Minister:
“Leadership is about having a vision for this country. It’s about having the courage to take difficult decisions, persuading your party that those difficult decisions will pay off in time, and taking responsibility for your mistakes. He has failed on every count.”
The problem, as she saw it, was that Labour had confused electoral victory for political purpose. But, she told them, “the work doesn’t end when you get the job, that’s when it starts”.
That job ought to involve stimulating private sector growth by getting government out of the way, reining in welfare spending, rebuilding national defences and quitting the ECHR and repealing the Human Rights Act to restore to Parliament powers surrendered to “activist lawyers” and international bodies.
This was the intellectual cord that ran through Badenoch’s critique: not merely that the Prime Minister was “in office but not in power”, but that Labour was averse to power itself because its exercise involved making choices too difficult for a party that prefers the easy slogans of opposition. “They hate being in government,” she contended. “They hate the responsibility. They just want to scratch the itches they had in opposition.”
Across the chamber, front and backbenchers alike noisily dissented from Badenoch’s oratorical autopsy of their listless and divided Government, and well they might given how frequently she got in digs about the ongoing plot to oust Starmer from Number 10. “They want to lead our country; they can’t even lead a coup,” she jibed.
But partisan and political though her attacks were, there was little she said that would not be echoed by a Labour-friendly pollster or Blair-era grandee invited to give their assessment of the Government’s performance.
There is no lie your opponent can tell about you that hurts as keenly as an uncomfortable truth.
The sharpest Labour minds will have recognised that Badenoch was on to something, but accepting that the Government has lost its way is insufficient without an understanding of why.
As long as ministers and backbenchers refuse to confront the misconceptions that inform Labour’s approach to national leadership, to markets, to growth and productivity, to energy, to immigration control, and every other area where the party is failing, there is no prospect of a course correction. Worse, there is a greater prospect of doubling down, of a Starmer successor lurching deeper into destructive economic populism.
Badenoch attempted to make this point by telling Labour MPs that Reform UK’s Nigel Farage was “not the cause of Britain’s problems” but rather “a symptom”. “Fix the problems,” she averred, “and he goes away.” The almighty squalling and hooting and huffing that burst forth from the Labour benches, as though from a particularly amorous rooster enclosure during mating season, gave the game away.
This is a party bent on believing itself the victim of a sinister “far Right” ascendancy rather than seeing the truth: that it is a Government whose habitual failings and invincible incuriosity about workable remedies are creating fertile soil for popular disillusionment and populist alternatives. Labour is not ready to hear Badenoch’s message that “Britain is not ungovernable and it’s not broken; we just need to take tough decisions to get the country out of the mess it’s in”.
Labour is vaguely aware the country is in a mess but it cannot face up to why that is the case, and even if it did it could not bring itself to do what is necessary to mount a rescue. Labour prefers the mess because the mess doesn’t ask anything difficult of you.
You just have to sink further and further into it while accusing those who propose to clean it up of being callous or mean-spirited or coldly rational. Ms Badenoch’s speech represented the great sweeping broom that British politics needs."
Extracts above: you can read the whole article on the Telegraph site at:
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