Has Kemi Badenoch engineered a political disaster?
Picture credit: Tejas Sandhu/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images
Barring a late Christmas miracle, her allegations against Reform UK seem to have backfired
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One of Kemi Badenoch’s biggest claims for herself has been that she’s an engineer. “Right now, this country desperately needs an engineer,” Mrs Badenoch has said.
“Engineers fix problems,” she has claimed, “We do tough stuff … Engineers are realists … There is little room for error in what we do … Engineers accept reality. Engineers are honest. Engineers get stuff done. I am an engineer.”
It seems ironic, then, that Badenoch has walked into what looks like an avoidable disaster by accusing Reform UK, in a fiery Twitter thread, of using a “fake ticker” to inflate its membership statistics. Badenoch suggested that Nigel Farage had been “manipulating [his] own supporters at Xmas” and referenced “endless lies, smoke and mirrors, stuff and nonsense politics”.
What happened to being an honest realist with little room for error?
Well, it’s looking like Mrs Badenoch might have tweeted too soon. Sky News has assessed these claims and concluded that Reform “provided strong evidence that the ticker was not automated”. The Telegraph and the Financial Times appear to agree. Even The Spectator have carefully said that a demonstration of the ticker’s inner workings “appeared to provide evidence that the online tally did correspond to members that had signed up to Reform”. Nigel Farage is hinting towards libel action.
What happened to being an honest realist with little room for error? Well, perhaps Badenoch is sitting on evidential dynamite that will validate her claims. Stranger things have happened. But if she is, she’s been sitting on it for too long.
What’s so bizarre is that this controversy was so avoidable. Yes, Reform had been trolling the Tories by projecting their membership statistics onto Conservative Campaign Headquarters. I am sure that was annoying. But in launching her ill-fated diatribe against Reform, Badenoch only drew attention to what no one denies: that Reform’s membership is growing.
If she was indeed mistaken in her claim that the Reform ticker was “fake”, that mistake is all the more embarrassing given the sloppiness of her Twitter thread. Calling Christmas “Xmas” should be banned, of course, but at least that isn’t outright wrong like calling Alastair Campbell “Alister Campbell”. The bizarre punctuation in Badenoch’s thread also gave one the doubtless false impression that it had been written by someone who had been going a bit hard on the Christmas fizz.
“I never have gaffes,” Mrs Badenoch has said (in a clip gleefully resurrected by Reform chairman Zia Yusuf), “I never have to clarify because I think carefully about what I say.” This will amuse people who remember her maternity pay backtracking, or her garbled claims about becoming working class, or her false assertion that she had never opposed housing development in her constituency.
All politicians have gaffes, of course. No one can speak a lot without putting their foot in it from time to time. But Badenoch is distinguished by the brazen confidence with which she jumps two-footed into avoidable errors. Again, she didn’t have to say anything — but if she does have evidence that Reform have been up to funny business, she could have put it out in a measured and professional way instead of posting a sloppy rant over Christmas.
Mrs Badenoch has been trying to emphasise that unlike Mr Farage she can “think seriously” and can “be taken seriously”. In her Twitter thread, she declared that Reform are all about “rage” whereas the Conservatives are about “hard, unvarnished truths”. Reform are offering “gimmicks” she insisted, whereas the Conservatives are offering “principles and values”.
If she does have evidence that Farage has been “manipulating” his supporters, the time to demonstrate it has come. Otherwise, it will be clear that Mrs Badenoch’s rage drew her to the first gimmick at hand, which does not exactly scream hard, unvarnished truths or principles and values. Certainly, it will make it tough to take her seriously.
The Critic