I had a notion the other day that there was possibly more I could offer to this fleeting world. A feeling that with life having been comparatively kind to me, perhaps there is something I could put back. I have these thoughts about once every month – and usually they are idly dismissed because they are either unrealistic or homicidal.
For example, it would be well nigh impossible to smash every single white, middle-class, middle-aged liberal in the throat until his trachea exploded in a chiaroscuro of livid pink foam and vaporised black lung stuff. Way too many tracheas and not enough time, sadly. Let them continue living a lie, was the conclusion I came to, reckoning that one day they will be brought to judgment before a God who is perhaps more vigorously right of centre on certain issues than they had dared imagine.
Badenoch made a pretty good stab at offending everybody, including members of her own party
Or the wolves idea. I have always supported rewilding, especially of our apex predators, but had preferred as a venue for the trial run somewhere in SW9, rather than the remote and inhospitable Scottish highlands. Both of those ideas were dismissed, then, as being fanciful.
But more recently I wondered if there was something less obviously deranged I might do which could improve the lot of my fellow man, something less demanding on the attentions of the Serious Crime Squad. And what I could do, I thought to myself rather grandly, was perhaps offer help to a politician I admired and who might do well by our benighted country – and the politician I alighted upon was the leader of the Conservative party, Kemi Badenoch. I like her a lot. She seems to me to be on the right track. There is a verve and wit behind that reflexive political business which I have long thought was something different to the normal – but which also seemed, in this climate, caviar to the general. Maybe, I wondered, I could help out a little. Just offer up some jokes she could put in a speech. I know my value.
Ah, such hubris. She doesn’t remotely need them. I read a polemic by Badenoch last week which was in one fell swoop easily the best analysis of where we are and why we are where we are, but also the funniest and the most acute. What was most remarkable about it was the quality of writing and the depth of thought, together with a lowering – almost joyous – contempt for her fellow inhabitants in that shallow lagoon in which she swims. It was not like your usual political essay by a politician, which ticks all the right boxes and is terrified of offending. Badenoch made a pretty good stab at offending everybody, including members of her own party. I would argue that even if you disagree with the woman, she is worth voting for because there is clearly an intellect and passion there which is otherwise absent from our political discourse.
She began with this. ‘The zombie parliament resumes tomorrow. Labour MPs will return from a hot, ill-tempered recess and go through the motions. They’ll pretend to support a prime minister they can’t wait to be rid of, and continue giving badly written speeches full of AI slop about a nonexistent government agenda.’
She had me won over with AI slop, but on she went, describing the administration as the most economically illiterate on record and castigating Labour for its almost comical ‘unseriousness’: ‘Every week the bar is lowered as Labour MPs pursue new ideas to restore Britain to greatness, ranging from supervised toothbrushing in schools to holding a sex toy exhibition. Too many of the people who have entered parliament recently are simply not up to the job. It’s not just that a large number come to Westminster because they couldn’t get into showbiz…’
Yay. Of course she did not – could not – offer a solution to much of this, or at least not to the existential problem facing parliament – that is a convocation of the determinedly third-rate, of people who lack both elementary logic and ideas. Second-rate minds bestowed upon us at least partly because the rewards for participating in our democracy – supposedly power and money – are on about the same level as you’d get for being the 14th most important person in a small borough council.
It is no surprise, then, that the Ciceros of today decide to give parliament a pretty wide berth, or that when the Labour party leadership is trawling around for someone with a modicum of intelligence who might ably represent our cause in the USA, the best any of them can come up with is that eel-like fantasist Peter Mandelson. The utter dearth of talent is, or should be, shocking.
When I worked as a speechwriter in the Labour shadow cabinet in the mid-1980s there were, working their political passage through a joyless opposition, Denis Healey, Peter Shore, Roy Hattersley, Jack Cunningham, Tony Blair, Robin Cook… not to mention, a little before, David Owen, Jim Callaghan, Shirley Williams and Roy Jenkins. Most of these were people who wrote books, most of which were worth reading – yes even Arguments for Socialism. Would you read a book by Pat McFadden, or the ludicrous Ed Davey, or Robert Generic or whatever he’s called? Why would you? For pleasure? For enlightenment?
In truth, Kemi’s jeremiad was less notable for what it said than for the way in which it said it. A cry from the dark, a railing against the dying of the light – because the light has been dimming these past 40 years or so to the point where one has come to accept that whoever has their hand upon the tiller is almost certainly an idiot.
That’s why Badenoch’s fusillade was so important: it talked about cleverness and was not shy of suggesting that, counter-intuitively, cleverness might be quite a good thing, rather than something to be suffocated at birth.
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