There was a moment backstage, before I interviewed Kemi Badenoch for a Spectator event this week, when I felt like John Sergeant with Margaret Thatcher bearing down on him as he pronounced her leadership in difficulty. I suggested to Badenoch that she was a rare example of a politician I had changed my mind about. ‘You mean you were very negative before?’ she said, fixing me with the full alpha female glare.
I muttered something placatory, but the truth is that a year ago I thought she was rubbish – and that was the mainstream view in her own party. She was arrogant, flat-footed, absenting herself from a stage that was being dominated by Nigel Farage, resistant to advice, convinced she was great at PMQs when even Keir Starmer was wiping the floor with her. She thought the political ‘game’ was beneath her and the media was an impertinent nuisance.
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At the 2024 party conference, I watched her imperiously dismiss anyone who questioned her approach. ‘I’m doing it my way,’ she proclaimed after a week of PR gaffes (capped with her statement that she ‘never has gaffes’). ‘I’m striding through the fire,’ she told me at the time. Those of us around the table WhatsApped each other the meme of the cartoon dog sitting in a burning room proclaiming: ‘Everything is fine.’
