Kemi Badenoch is floundering at PMQs

Calling for the prime minister’s resignation is the nuclear option – for the leader of the opposition, it is the weapon of last resort.

David Cameron was almost four years into the role when he first demanded Gordon Brown step down and call an election, with the Labour leader’s cabinet in pretty much open revolt. Starmer waited two years for his first public call for Boris Johnson’s head, and that was prompted over the latter’s misleading Parliament over the Bacchanalian debauchery in Downing Street during lockdown.

Kemi Badenoch, 25 days into her tenure as Leader of His Majesty’s Most Loyal Opposition, today demanded that Keir Starmer resign immediately and spark a general election, less than five months after the previous one in which he won a stonking majority. And the reason? A petition is doing the rounds on social media, pushed by a dunderheaded tech baron in America, calling for one.

Badenoch – back after being deputised for by someone called Alex Burghart last week and, yes, I did have to look that name up – was being criticised by Starmer for not putting forward an agenda for how her party would deal with the myriad crises bequeathed to the government by, er, her party.

“Mr Speaker, if he wants to know what Conservatives would do he should resign and find out,” said Badenoch. “There’s a petition out there, two million people asking him to go.”

And there you go. Little more than three weeks into the role and Badenoch had deployed the most powerful weapon in her armoury, all in support of a futile online petition, powered by bots, promoted by an oddball billionaire conspiracy theorist and championed by your uncle on Facebook. Is that it?

“She talks about a petition – we had a massive petition on the fourth of July in this country,” countered Starmer. “We spent years taking our party from a party of protest to a party of government. They’re hurtling in the opposite direction.”

Starmer was wrong, of course. We had an election on the fourth of July, not a petition. The former’s more important – it actually makes a difference and requires more effort than clicking on your phone. You have to go to a church hall and wrestle with a stubby little pencil on a piece of string and everything.

Even Badenoch knows this. In 2019, as 10,000 people in her constituency signed a petition to revoke Article 50 and remain in the EU – one that reached over 6m signatures overall – the then humble backbencher told her local paper, the Saffron Walden Reporter, that the country was run on elections, not petitions. It’s still there, online, under the unambiguous headline of “Saffron Walden leads Essex on ‘stop Brexit’ action – but MP says ‘country is run on elections, not petitions’”.

It is becoming increasingly apparent that Kemi Badenoch is not very good at this PMQs malarkey. She then went on to comments from the boss of biscuit peddler McVitie’s that Rachel Reeves’ recent Budget had made the UK less attractive for investors.

“So while the prime minister has been hobnobbing in Brazil, businesses have been struggling to digest his Budget. Isn’t it the case, Mr Speaker, that the Employment Rights Bill shows that it’s not only the ginger nut that is causing him problems?,” she said.

It’s difficult to know where to start with this one. From the tortured biscuit ‘jokes’ (on the front bench Burghart gamely laughed along, while Priti Patel remained stony-faced and Chris Philp bore the expression of a man considering jacking it all in to go birdwatching in Colombia) to the dismissal of attending a G20 summit as “hobnobbing”. From conflating the Budget and the Employment Rights Bill to referring to the deputy prime minister as “the ginger nut” (“I am somebody who wants the colour of skin to be no more significant than the colour of our hair,” Badenoch told a leadership hustings in September).

“Everything is broken,” she concluded in her attack on the prime minister. “Mr Speaker, I think she just read out the charge sheet on the last government,” responded Starmer. “Everything is broken.”

Chief among them, of course, are the hopes and dreams of one Robert Edward Jenrick MP. He lost to this? Still, on this performance, he’ll probably get another crack in 18 months or so.