For staff at the Spectator long in the tooth enough to have crossed paths with Kemi Badenoch – the magazine’s head of digital from 2015 to 2016 – her recent Radio 4 Today interview with Amol Rajan was shudderingly familiar.
Confronted with a poll of party members on grassroots Tory website ConservativeHome showing a majority think she is failing to deliver any actual policies the electorate can get behind, Badenoch responded with her usual barrage of bluster, bombast and baloney: “We are working on the plans! We have policies when we need them! I won’t be rushed!”
The motormouth rhetoric coupled with a complete absence of any concrete strategy for containing the rising threat of Nigel Farage’s Reform party came as no surprise to those who endured similar spiels in her brief tenure at the right wing magazine.
“She was unbelievably crap,” one Spectator insider told magazine The Fence in 2022. Badenoch operated a “kiss up, kick down” policy – brown-nosing editor at the time Fraser Nelson and chairman Andrew Neil while being rude and difficult to junior staff.
“She would come to meetings and blether on and on about her long-term strategy for success,” another co-worker at the time told Rats in a Sack. “The trouble is, nothing ever actually happened. She was just a major league jazz hands merchant and utterly hopeless at getting stuff done. None of us could understand why she was in the job.”
In a brief post describing her time at the Spectator and its sister magazine Apollo, Badenoch claimed: “I redesigned and delivered the digital strategy for these two publications.”
“Typical Kemi,” her former colleague told Rats. “What does it actually mean? And what did she actually achieve? The answer to both questions is: nothing.”
Badenoch has been lead of the opposition for six months. Whether she lasts longer in this job than she did at the Speccie remains to be seen.
