Kemi Badenoch spared no prisoners this morning as she delivered her first attack speech dedicated to Andy Burnham and his incoming Cabinet of radical left-wingers. The Tory leader warned that a ‘summer of chaos’ is upon us as Burnham takes a ‘three month holiday’ to work out what he plans to do once handed the keys to No. 10.
While Badenoch aimed plenty of fire at the new MP for Makerfield, she was magnificently brutal when offering her thoughts on his likely Chancellor, Ed Miliband. The Conservative leader doubled down on her view that the Net Zero zealot is akin to a ‘Nigerian military dictator’ as he continues his stubborn blockade of North Sea drilling.
When asked by the Financial Times whether such language was unbecoming of a senior politician, the Conservative leader hit back that she was sick of ‘language policing’ and would not be apologising for ‘hurty words’.
Badenoch blasted: ‘Nigeria is an oil-producing country that never had any electricity. Why? Because it had bad policies from military dictatorships, people who they didn’t care what people, what the country wanted.
‘They imposed socialism on the country, they took over all of the oil, you know, the oil production, they had a national state oil producer, and it failed. Ed Miliband is actually doing the same thing, he wants to do more state control. He has terrible policies that are reducing our capacity, reducing our energy security.
‘Having lived under both, I think I’m uniquely placed to make that comparison. Yes, Ed Miliband is acting like the Nigerian military dictators who ruined a lot of that country’s economic potential and made it so much poorer, and in some cases bankrupted the country.’
At her London press conference Badenoch repeated her call for a general election if Andy Burnham signs off on the defence investment plan so poorly funded by Sir Keir Starmer that it triggered John Healey to resign.
Comments