The Tory leader’s appearance on the Today programme was sheer madness – and comedy gold
C
ast your mind forward 10 years or so. Long after Kemi Badenoch has been sacked as Tory party leader without even getting to contest an election. Long after she has been fired from a sinecure in an HR firm for falling out with all her colleagues. Long after she was dismissed from a Tory thinktank for being unable to think. Long after she was forced to take early retirement.
You might think Kemi’s name would be long forgotten by then. But you would be wrong. Because her name will live for evermore. Six years from now a group of psychiatrists and psychotherapists will gather in May for what will become the most oversubscribed symposium in the history of medical and therapeutic science. Freudians, Jungians, Kleinians, cognitive behaviourists, psychodynamic and systemic therapists. The lot. Everyone will be there. Trying to make sense of the most intriguing problem to have troubled shrinks everywhere. Who or what is Kemi? More importantly, why is Kemi?
Some believe that Kemi was just an unfortunate one-off. Emerging out of deserved obscurity after Boris Johnson’s decision to throw any sane Tory out of the party. A sort of big bang event with disastrous consequences. Others have started to wonder if Kemi was even real. Instead she was some creation of AI, a mass of electrical connections formed in the deepest cesspit of the dark web. What everyone agrees on, though, is that no one in the history of the psychological sciences has ever been so consistently wrong about everything. It’s almost an achievement to fall out with everyone. Including herself. Is she sad, mad or bad? Or all three?
