“It’s time for something completely different,” said Kemi Badenoch at her Conservative leadership bid launch on September 2. Hopes that this near-miss at the Monty Python catchphrase was cueing up combative Kemi’s version of the Argument Clinic (“This isn’t an argument, this is is abuse – and I love it”) or the Parrot Sketch (“We are a dead party; we have ceased to be”) proved shortlived. But once the disappointment had subsided she did go on to say something interesting about Brexit. Which was: virtually nothing.
There was next to nothing about Brexit in her launch speech, apart from a jibe at her born-again Brexiteer rival Robert Jenrick over his eagerness to leave the European Convention on Human Rights. There was barely anything about it in her interview with the influential Conservative Home website, bar a determination to push back at Labour “when they try to do us down on Brexit”.
There was no mention of Brexit in Badenoch’s 2,000-word campaign statement, a truly dismal prospectus in which she attacks Labour for having “no ideas” and then reveals no ideas of her own beyond meaningless platitudes (“a country belongs to its citizens”, “we need to celebrate families”) and culture war nastiness (“our country is not a… hotel for those passing through”, “alien ideas that have no place here”).
And there was nothing about Brexit in her glossy social media campaign video, the biggest revelation of which is that Badenoch has won the backing of the swimmer Sharron Davies (something in the water, perhaps?) “I love this country because I think it is the most amazing place to be in the world,” Badenoch beams in the clip, hinting at a future career as an insight-light travel presenter in the Michael Portillo style should her leadership campaign go the way his did.
It doesn’t look like it will, and that’s why all this matters. Unless the rug is somehow pulled from under her in next week’s second round of MP voting, Badenoch is likely to become the next leader of the opposition. In a poll of 800 members carried out by Conservative Home on September 2-3, she won 34% of the support with Jenrick a distant second on 18%.
And to achieve this status as clear favourite, she has not had to bang the drum for Brexit purity as Boris Johnson and Liz Truss did. She is shying away from talk of Singapore-on-Thames, or quitting “foreign courts”, or making Northern Ireland’s trade arrangements with the EU worse to satisfy ideologues, or the treasure chest to be unlocked once Global Britain is finally unleashed.
Perhaps Badenoch is saving all that for the Tory conference, where she will have to feed the dozing hordes some red meat. But perhaps, in a neat inversion of another Monty Python moment, she’s joined the rest of us in asking “what has Brexit ever done for us?”. And then, as we do, coming up with precisely nothing.
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