Kemi Badenoch has spent five years as a government minister, two of them in the Cabinet. This is relatively extensive government experience – more than most of the people in Keir Starmer’s administration, given Labour’s long time in opposition. She is not an ingenue.
Moreover, Badenoch’s experience in Cabinet was in international-facing departments (specifically trade), not domestic ones. She will have spent years surrounded by civil servants explaining the sensitivities of diplomatic relations and the need to choose her words carefully – and to make sure she is briefed before she speaks.
All of this is worth emphasising because it is incredibly easy to forget all of it when you hear Kemi Badenoch speak. More specifically, Badenoch at the weekend managed to make a series of comments so staggeringly stupid and counterproductive that the only usual excuse would be that the person saying them is vastly inexperienced, out of their depth, and being asked a question they can’t reasonably be expected to answer.
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So it is important to remember that Badenoch is none of these things. She is an experienced cabinet minister and the leader of the opposition. In other words, she has no excuse to be giving answers as bizarre as the ones she’s giving out – and any remaining tolerance for her nonsense from her party should be wearing out.
Let’s get to the remarks, as Badenoch made one that was merely stupid, followed in very quick succession by one that was calamitous, both in an interview with Sky News on Sunday.
The first was to claim that “Israel is fighting a proxy war on behalf of the UK” with its aggression against Gaza. This is such a bizarre claim that it would merit an article-length dissection in itself. Israel retaliated against Gaza because of the attacks of October 7, 2023. Its untrammelled aggression and prolonged conflict has fuelled both antisemitism and Islamophobia across the world, and undermined Israel’s standing even among its allies.
It is widely regarded as a senseless loss of life, motivated in part by Benjamin Netanyahu’s desire to cling onto power and forestall his own prosecution over corruption. Explaining how any of this represents the UK’s interests – let alone to anything like the extent of being a “proxy war” on our behalf – would be quite the task.
This remark alone was thoughtless, callous and inane – but Badenoch was just getting started. To complete her thought, she added “just like Ukraine is on behalf of Western Europe against Russia”. This is one of the talking points Russia and its advocates have been keen to push ever since Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022. It is a talking point of the Stop The War and Corbynite left, and is pushed by apologists for Putin.
The Kremlin was obviously delighted. The Russian foreign minister posted on Facebook that “Kemi Badenoch has finally called a spade a spade… Ukraine is indeed fighting a proxy war against Russia… The objective of Russia’s Special Military Operation is to put an end to the proxy-war and restore peace”.
This is calamitously bad from Badenoch, and it will be used time and again by Russia to suggest a former cabinet minister has somehow given the game away. Early in the invasion, Putin admitted its reason – that he regards Ukraine as part of Russia and wants to subsume it. But claims of a Russia versus the West proxy war allows the country to reframe it as a defensive project, or even an anti-imperialist one. Badenoch has, when trying to make a bizarre point about a different conflict entirely, endorsed Russia’s favourite talking point.
There are several possibilities as to how this happens, and none of them are good. One is simply that Badenoch said what she thinks, and this is her true belief – meaning that on top of everything else, the Conservative Party elected a Corbynite as its leader. This seems unlikely.
The other is that Badenoch was speaking fast and loose, and didn’t really stop to consider what “proxy war” meant. This could be because she was woefully unprepared, or because she is unwilling to choose her words carefully. Either would make her unfit for the office she currently holds, let alone the prime ministerial office to which she aspires.
Kemi Badenoch puts her foot in her mouth almost every time she opens it, which is a poor trait in an opposition leader. Usually, though, the consequences of that mostly affect only her and the Conservative Party – but this time was different.
The simple truth is that the Tories have a leader who shouldn’t be allowed to speak in public, right at a time when they are in a battle for their very survival as a political force. For how much longer can that be allowed to continue?
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