Kemi Badenoch is outstandingly bad at her job

“Generals always prepare to fight the last war, especially if they had won it,” said the former French prime minister Georges Clemenceau. This makes a sort of sense. What makes precisely no sense is that Kemi Badenoch’s party lost the last war, or election, by a landslide and yet, curiously, she appears determined to fight it again.

The Tories spent much of the general election campaign drawing the public’s attention to Keir Starmer’s record: his supposed soft record on migration, his campaigning for the rights of asylum seekers, his willingness to serve in the shadow cabinet of Jeremy Corbyn. And the public looked at him, looked back at the Conservatives, and handed Starmer a whopping majority.

Having now had time to reflect on the general election, the Conservatives’ strategy, priorities and campaign, Badenoch has now decided: what if that, but more?

It’s a brave move, alright. Previous leaders of the opposition faced with a prime minister whose approval ratings have plunged lower, more quickly than practically any previous incumbent and whose first few months in office have been defined by a series of wildly unpopular policy decisions seemingly designed to alienate every single interest group in society one by one, might have chosen a different approach. Say, focus on those and exploit them relentlessly, week in week out.

But not Kemi! She doesn’t abide by the traditional rules, so here we are, spending an entire session of prime minister’s questions focusing on things Starmer said years before entering office rather than the fact, say, that dozens of tractors were in the street outside protesting something his government has actually done in recent weeks to the fury of a group generally aligned with conservative politics. Clever Kemi!

“Let’s look at his record,” she told the Commons. “Four years ago the prime minister signed a letter demanding that foreign criminals be allowed to stay in Britain.” At this Mims Davies, the shadow Wales secretary, did the ‘can I have the bill’ sign in the air with her pen, lest any MPs be unaware what her leader meant by the mysterious concept of “signing a letter”.

“Dozens of Labour and Liberal Democrat MPs repeatedly signed these letters insisting that rapists and murderers be allowed to stay here!,” she went on. It is not clear whether any MP ever explicitly insisted “I think rapists and murderers be allowed to stay here”, but there you go. “Will he apologise for signing these letters?”.

Starmer did not, choosing instead to remind Badenoch that the most recent immigration figures under the Conservatives had been four times that when the UK was in the EU.

“He doesn’t want to talk about his past, Mr Speaker,” said Badenoch – which is untrue, as on several occasions this session he banged on about being director of public prosecutions, again – “but that letter is just the tip of the iceberg.

“There is more. The prime minister actually complained that the immigration system was working to deter migrants rather than provide support! He said, and I quote, that he was proud to have served as Jeremy’s shadow immigration minister! He boasted that he took the last Labour government to court for cutting benefits for asylum seekers! He said that he would never set a target-based approach to immigration!

“He wants to talk about immigration? Let’s talk about his record. He can talk about it all day. I have committed to a cap on migration. Why won’t he?” (Unfortunately for Badenoch, this rather hung her spokesman out to dry post-PMQs when, not unreasonably, he was asked by journalists what exactly this cap was Badenoch had committed to. The answer was, er, don’t know.)

Starmer banged on a bit more about how he’d been director of public prosecutions – “the hard yards of convicting those who should be in prison. And she presided over record numbers of asylum seekers in this country, a record number of lawful and irregular migrants”.

Badenoch sniffed at this. “He wants to talk about the past,” she complained, all irony lost. It is possible that she’s playing four-dimensional chess, as they say. But it is increasingly likely that she is just very, very bad at this.

Conversely, playing boring old conventional politics was the Liberal Democrat leader, Ed Davey, who chose to question Starmer on THE ACTUAL BIGGEST STORY IN THE WORLD AT THE MOMENT, Syria.

“Does the prime minister share my concern that President-elect Trump said about Syria, ‘the United States should have nothing to do with it?’, said Davey. “If America steps away, will the prime minister step up and work with other allies to provide British leadership over Syria?”.

Leaving aside the surprise emergence of the robust, interventionist Liberal Democrats, this, in an alternate reality, might be the question an actual leader of the opposition would nose off on. But not Kemi Badenoch. That 2024 general election’s still there for the winning!