In politics, the ability to entertain is underrated…

Donald Trump and Kemi Badenoch may not, at first sight, have a great deal in common. Both are in politics, of course, but the first is a deeply unattractive narcissist who loudly mutilates the English language and has the attention span of a blowfly on speed, while the other is the fiercely intelligent daughter of Nigerian immigrants to the UK, who has carefully considered and deeply felt Utilitarian convictions which she articulates with admirable clarity, and to which she shows every sign of having the courage, sooner or, if necessary, much later, to give practical effect.

Both Kemi and the big Orange man find themselves in parties that don’t quite understand their appeal.

When Boris, for reasons that still elude me, comprehensively blew the opportunity his 2019 election triumph had garnered him, it was clear to me that those he had disappointed were praying for the Conservative Party to snap out of its centralist, metropolitan dream. They yearned for it to install as its leader someone who embodied the values with which the Conservatives were traditionally associated, and who had the rhetorical gifts necessary to face down the crypto-socialists with which the Tory party had become infested, and who had rendered it culturally indistinguishable from the Labour Party of Blair. Instead of doing so, it has succumbed twice to the tyranny of the least-offensive, and chosen leaders notable only for their lack of charisma, and without the redeeming feature of resolute conviction.

The demented rise of Jeremy Corbyn had extended the Torie party’s lease on power, but arguably at the expense of compelling it to reform itself by rediscovering its philosophical origins. The party now finds itself unable to decide whether it will lose heavily at the next election, or suffer an annihilating electoral catastrophe. Nobody seriously thinks it can win.

Throughout this woeful performance, Badenoch seems to have kept a clean nose, filling with unostentatious distinction a series of demanding posts, and occasionally giving vent to thoughts which are music to the ears of any true Tory. And not just to true Tories, but to a broad mass of the UK electorate who have retained their common sense despite the madness of identitarian politics that has consumed the chattering classes. These attainments alone ought to earn her the role of contender for leadership. But I suggest that she has another attribute, sometimes referred to as the X factor, which makes a compelling argument that she is capable of rescuing her party by leading it. It might be worth trying to define with greater precision what that X factor is.

The voters who installed Boris, and whom he subsequently betrayed, included a large and crucial cohort who voted for him not because they were instinctive Conservatives, nor even because they found him a particularly appealing human being, but because they were fed up with being disregarded and implicitly ridiculed by the bien pensant elites who predominated in the corridors of power. They believed that, having championed Britain’s exit from the ruthlessly counter-democratic EU, Boris, despite his Eton-educated pedigree, would see off those elites, and would do so in a gratifyingly entertaining way. They didn’t want him merely to curb the power of the over-promoted mediocracy, they wanted it to hurt. They wanted payback. Boris failed to gratify those wishes, but that should not blind us to the fact of their continued existence. That those who have succeeded Boris have failed to finish what he started is one of the chief reasons why their party is facing oblivion.

While large parts of her party were busy betraying it, Badenoch was becoming the princess across the water. She holds out the promise to epater les bourgeois in a way that even Boris, before he married that dreadful woman, caught Covid and lost his mojo (to put the most charitable gloss on his performance) could never do. Because Boris is male, and very white. Badenoch is female, and very black. In the eyes of the bien pensants Boris’ Red Wall voters want to see punished, the proper place for a black woman in politics is in the Labour Party, sitting grumpily next to Diane Abbott, wearing a face like a slapped bottom and moaning endlessly about how hard life has been for them, what with Britain being systemically racist and misogynist, and all. If she really must be in the Conservative Party, she should at least be a loyal member of that Mayite blob that believes its adversaries when they say it is the nasty party, and that electoral salvation is to be found in the successful search for a way to pick up a turd by the clean end.

Rishi Sunak is a technocrat, offering a hyper-managerial model of governance, yet seemingly lacking the resolve to brave the disapproval of the elites that would be necessary to solve Britain’s besetting problems. As a scourge of the elite blob, he fails miserably.

Badenoch is famous for her opinion that there is no place on earth better than Britain to be a black woman. To quibble, as an Australian, with that view would be churlish, but so far as I can see, the rest of her world view may safely be inferred from it, from the insouciance with which she is willing to express it, and from her indifference to the storm of outraged disapproval it was bound to provoke. Even from the limited prominence afforded her as a minister in a moribund government, she already affronts and discomfits the bien pensant blob. The opportunity to elect a government whose leader would make these people’s heads explode every morning as they perused their Guardian or Independent over their muesli has got to give even the most disaffected Red Wall voter pause for thought, and could well snatch victory from the jaws of defeat. 

Competence to govern is an obvious prerequisite for electoral success. Flattering ourselves that we are rational beings, we pretend that sheer entertainment value plays no part in our electoral decisions. But it’s just not true. Boris succeeded in large part because he was a natural entertainer. Badenoch offers both competence and the ability to entertain, not by performing, like Boris, but simply by being what she is.

Which brings us to Trump. His win in 2016 was sealed when his adversary, Hillary, uttered her now-infamous ‘basket of deplorables’ remark. In one smug, throwaway remark, she reminded the flyover states what it was the coastal elites loathed about them, and vice versa. She might as well have said ‘See this self-satisfied smirk on my face? Vote for Trump, why don’t you, and see it wiped the off my face.’ And they duly accepted her invitation, many not because they were die-hard MAGA-heads, but simply because of the fun to be had from watching what a Trump victory, like a Badenoch one, would do to the people they loathed.

In the case of Trump’s 2024 prospects, the idiotic lawfare waged against him has had a similar effect to Hillary’s quip, while 4 years under the presidency of a dotard whose many failings include restoring to Iran the financial means to wreak the mayhem we are now seeing in the Middle East have done much to convince voters who may find his personal style offensive to hold their noses and vote for him.

Here in Australia, we have seen our own conservative parties hollowed out by cultural self-doubt and pusillanimity. The same cowardly surrender to the blob has seen us lumbered with all the absurd, sociopathic green legislation that is ruining the rest of the western world.

However, I believe we’ve also got our own Kemi Badenoch. When the elites told us we should have a referendum to create an ‘indigenous voice’ to parliament, and told us that the only respectable vote was ‘yes’, the ‘no’ case was most cogently championed by Jacinta Napitjinpa Price, a senator for the Northern Territory and the daughter of a Scottish father and a full-blooded aboriginal mother. An outsider to Australia’s thriving aboriginal grievance industry, her opposition to the Voice prompted cries from bien pensant Australia that she was a ‘traitor to her race’. The referendum duly failed, by a resounding 60:40. As I argued in No!, the whopping scale of this defeat must remind Australia’s silent majority that they are, indeed a majority, no matter how much the elites might condescend to them. As I wrote then, Peter Dutton, the present Leader of the Opposition, is far from the brute his detractors claim he is, but neither does he have Senator Price’s delicious capacity to drive the elites crazy. With her at the helm, I suspect Albo could be toast.

Bring on the popcorn.