No, Badenoch did not take her criticism of Starmer ‘too far’

It wasn’t that long ago when the Westminster cognoscenti would assure us that Tory leader Kemi Badenoch was weak and inept. ‘Kemi Badenoch isn’t working’, declared Labour’s in-house magazine, the New Statesman, just last summer. The article quoted critics who described her as ‘fragile’ and ‘frightened’, an opposition leader who seemed incapable of holding Keir Starmer’s Labour government to account.

What a difference a year makes. Having once mocked her for being fragile and inept, Labour is now complaining Prime Minister’s Questions this week. And much of the press seems to agree.

The pearl-clutching response is mainly due to Badenoch’s criticisms of education secretary Bridget Phillipson and energy secretary Ed Miliband. Citing a poll by the National Education Union that found ‘zero per cent’ of its members believe Phillipson is doing a good job, Badenoch said, ‘It turns out appointing a spiteful class warrior as education secretary was a disaster’.

Before she turned her guns on the education secretary, Badenoch had some fun with Miliband. ‘When the going got tough, he jumped into bed with the mayor of Manchester [Andy Burnham]. It’s not the first time he’s betrayed someone close to him, is it?’, joked Badenoch, referencing Ed beating his brother, David, in the 2010 Labour leadership contest.

All of this was met with howls of dismay from the Labour Party. Starmer, apparently reprogrammed after Monday’s malfunction (close listeners to his resignation speech insist there was a brief lump in his throat), delivered a predictably robotic defense of his ministers and his premiership. Manufactured cheers broke out on the backbenches. To which Badenoch said: ‘I’ve never seen this much excitement on the Labour benches, cheering so loudly while there are 400 knives in his back.’

Apparently, these statements were enough to warrant an intervention from the speaker of the house, Lindsay Hoyle, who told Badenoch to show a ‘little bit more decorum and respect’. Phillipson was so aggrieved that she confronted the Conservative Party leader after PMQs, along with technology secretary Liz Kendall. Phillipson reportedly said Badenoch’s language had been ‘outrageous’.

She wasn’t the only one outraged. Indeed, the media response to Badenoch’s performance has been dripping with disdain. ‘Starmer dealt with this splurge of vitriol with good grace… he emerged from the exchanges as the better person’, went a sketch in the Guardian. The same newspaper published an extraordinary column only hours later. ‘It’s customary for the leader of the opposition to say something complimentary about the outgoing prime minister’, it said. ‘She has no idea how graceless she is. How charmless.’ Even the Spectator, which usually acts as the press office for the Conservative Party, wondered, ‘Did Kemi take the personal jibes too far at PMQs?’

Not only did Badenoch not ‘take things too far’, she arguably didn’t go far enough. At the very least, she should be applauded for giving Starmer and his frontbenchers the kind of send-off they richly deserved.

Phillipson, for one, has some nerve playing the hurt-feelings card. More than 100 independent schools have closed since she became the education secretary. Almost without exception, this is a direct consequence of Labour’s imposition of VAT taxes on private schools, thanks to which fees have increased by more than 20 per cent. Aspirational middle-class and lower-middle-class parents can no longer afford to send their children to these schools, so they have closed, and thousands of jobs have disappeared with them. Teachers without jobs and parents without a school to send their children to might have found even stronger words than ‘spiteful class warrior’ to describe Phillipson.

Miliband has been even worse. Putting his duplicity to one side (he was lobbying to become Burnham’s chancellor before the PM-to-be had even won his seat in Makerfield), the energy secretary has been a plague on the British economy. ExxonMobil’s ethylene plant in Scotland, Port Talbot’s steelworks, Vauxhall’s Luton factory and, more recently, the 200-year-old Denby Pottery in Derbyshire, are just some of the victims of his myopic pursuit of Net Zero. This is to say nothing about the wider economic impact of the UK’s crippling energy prices, which, thanks to Miliband, are now the highest in the developed world. A key figure behind the 2008 Climate Change Act, which established legally binding Net Zero targets, Miliband is now doing more to further deindustrialise Britain – destroying thousands of jobs in the process – than almost any of his predecessors combined. Again, history is likely to have harsher words for him than Badenoch found in the House of Commons on Wednesday.

As for Starmer, even if Badenoch had taken the Guardian’s advice and said something ‘complimentary’ about the prime minister, what would there be to say? The article certainly offered no suggestions. Even to say that he was ‘hardworking’ – a pretty low bar – wouldn’t be true of our part-time PM. This isn’t a prime minister deserving of any insincere praise.

Kemi Badenoch did her job in the Commons on Wednesday. The leader of the opposition gave this terrible government exactly what it deserves – a good kicking.

Hugo Timms is a staff writer at spiked.