We can learn a lot from Kemi Badenoch by watching her at inquiries. For one thing, she’s good at them. While other high-profile political figures have fallen apart under the relentless questioning of the barristers tasked with uncovering the truth of government failures (Matt Hancock’s emotional breakdown at Module 2 of the Covid Inquiry in November 2023 springs to mind), Badenoch seems to view them as an opportunity.
A few months ago, freshly appointed as leader of a party still grappling with a seismic electoral defeat, Badenoch used her time as a witness at the Post Office Inquiry to put forward her philosophy for how the government machine is broken. She blamed a civil service burdened by “too much vanilla” and a lack of “common sense” in Whitehall for the glacial pace of the Horizon compensation scheme – the same culprits we often hear cited by the Tory leader as responsible for everything from Britain’s low productivity to high immigration.
Her performance at the Covid Inquiry on Monday offered a similar opportunity. We are now on Module 4, which considers the UK’s vaccine rollout. Badenoch was summoned due to her role as equalities minister during the pandemic, and was quizzed on government efforts to improve uptake among minority communities. By astonishing coincidence, given the very different subject matters, many of the same themes emerged.
Badenoch was barely ten minutes into her evidence when she brought up the broken government machine: the challenge of silos and the lack of cooperation between departments due to not-invented-here syndrome. Excessive regulation got a mention too, with regards to GDPR and consent rules. Where there were shortcomings, the issue was always something outside her control as a minister, such as lack of data. “The problem wasn’t a shortage of data,” Hugo Keith KC gently proffered, citing a range of sources collecting the exact type of information Badenoch claimed was missing. “There was a shortage of data, just because there’s lots of data doesn’t mean it’s what you’re looking for,” she shot back. (No collapsing under the barrister’s sceptical gaze, à la Hancock, for her.)
She also got other narratives into the mix. During an exchange about the difficulties in getting vaccine information on people who have come to the UK via unauthorised routes, Badenoch, whose party is currently consumed by the question of how to regain credibility on both legal and illegal immigration, described them as “effectively committing a crime even by being here”. Keith suggested people in that situation might be hesitant to engage with the state, because they would be worried about being “reported”, only for Badenoch to clarify “deported”, before adding, “We cannot adjust our health system in my view to undermine borders and border security.” Maybe she misheard him, maybe it was a Freudian slip. Either way, a tick in the box for “Kemi Badenoch takes a hard line against illegal migrants.”
And a tick for “Kemi Badenoch stands up for free speech steers clear of antagonising Elon Musk” when she argued that WhatsApp groups were a bigger risk for the spreading of harmful anti-vax narratives than big social media platforms like Twitter (as it was then known). The latter, she argued, was an “open sphere” where misinformation could be challenged, making it less of an issue if conspiracy theories were running rampant. She didn’t back up this contention. And given multiple studies have been done on the spread of vaccine misinformation on Twitter and other platforms and its impact on public health outcomes, her dismissal that this might cause a serious challenge to a government trying to encourage vaccine take-up seems a bold stance for a former minister to take without offering evidence.
She offered no evidence either on her musings right at the end of the session about high levels of suspicion of government in ethnic minority communities, adding, “That’s just personal observation.”
That line is unlikely to get the same media attention as her answers to Laura Kuenssberg on Sunday, but it’s the same attitude. In a TV discussion about the Southport attack, Badenoch claimed one of the key issues was integration. Kuenssberg asked her for the evidence that this crime had anything to do with integration, given that the killer, Axel Rudakubana, had been born and raised in the UK by Christian parents; Badenoch cited “my personal experience”. She continued to insist on the integration angle, picking and choosing from the available evidence (which shows Rudakubana had violent material relating to various genocides and atrocities, which do not fit a clear ideological pattern) to back up a conclusion she already seemed set on.
Badenoch’s approach in these cases appears to be this: start with what her instincts tell her and work backwards from there. Her cast-iron confidence in her mind is one of the traits Conservatives liked about her when the leadership contest was underway; now that the party is failing to take advantage of Labour’s fall in the polls, fighting with Reform for second place with a leader who trails Nigel Farage in terms of net popularity, doubts are creeping in. Confidence without homework is one reason she has struggled to make progress at PMQs. It’s why her big reset speech didn’t land. And it’s getting harder not to notice.
Overall, Badenoch’s Covid Inquiry evidence yesterday didn’t tell us all that much about the vaccine rollout. But it told us something about her: the way she views the workings of government through a very specific “broke Whitehall” lens, her go-to emphasis on certain issues (she had more to say about immigration than the health service), and her certainty that her way of viewing the world must be correct, even if there isn’t evidence to support it. And it told us something about why, even with everything that is going wrong for the Labour government at the moment, the Tories are so far failing to find ways to turn that to their advantage.
This piece first appeared in the Morning Call newsletter; receive it every morning by subscribing on Substack here
[See also: Donald Trump’s gladiator politics]
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