Yeah but no but yeah but no but surrender. Life's just one big betrayal for Kemi and co

The Guardian

22-05-2025

I fear for Kemi Badenoch's sanity. She may need a little respite care. From herself. Little more than 24 hours after one of her by now customary car-crash outings at prime minister's questions in which she didn't appear to have noticed that Keir Starmer had U-turned on the winter fuel allowance, KemiKaze was emailing Tory party members to tell them the exciting news. She had had the prime minister on the rack and it was only down to her that Labour had done their reverse ferret.
Where do you even begin to start with this level of denial? Is it the assumption at Conservative party HQ that anyone left supporting the Tories must be technically braindead so won't have a clue what is going on? To be fair, that may not be a bad shout.
But what does it say about party bosses that they are still trying to rewrite history a day later? Trying to make out this was Kemi's finest hour. 'Congrats, Kemi. I've got to hand it to you. You really nailed PMQs today. Keir Starmer didn't know where to look.' It's kind of embarrassing. Not least because Labour's U-turn owed nothing to Kemi and the Tories. They are an irrelevance. It was the discontent among Labour MPs and voters what swung it.
As for Robert Jenrick, Kemi's main rival for the leadership, he was making a rare appearance in the Commons – he never comes to PMQs to offer Kemi amoral support – to reply to the lord chancellor's statement on the independent sentencing review (ISR) conducted by former Tory justice secretary David Gauke. Someone you would have thought might attract crossparty support.
Back in the day, Gauke was something of a Tory legend. Uncork the Gauke! As a Treasury minister during the early days of the Brexit negotiations, he would often be sent out by the chancellor to field awkward urgent questions as the government got increasingly muddled. And Dave would do it with good grace. Never afraid to make an idiot of himself in pursuit of a higher goal.
But somewhere along the way, during the time he was justice secretary, Gauke got fed up with being the fall guy. Decided that he couldn't keep silent while some of the self-radicalised leavers in his own government cheerfully advocated a no-deal Brexit. So he spoke out and was kicked out of the party by Boris Johnson.
That alone should have booked Dave a place among the pantheon of good guys. Only not for Honest Bob. For Jenrick, Gauke's centrism marked him out as a wrong 'un. A cheese-eating surrender monkey. And Honest Bob had had enough of surrender this week after Labour's EU deal that had undone a few nano particles of Boris's Brexit agreement.
So Jenrick was spitting blood. The government's ISR was yet another betrayal in a long history of betrayal. Labour had gone soft on criminals. Why couldn't Shabana Mahmood, the justice secretary, and Gauke have adopted the Texas model? There was a US state that knew how to execute crims. Even if they were innocent. Wait. What was that? Labour had used the Texas model? In which case, why not something more like Russia or Saudi Arabia. They took no prisoners. Or rather they did.
Everything was wrong, said Honest Bob. Violent criminals were going to be running around on the street, raping women and slaughtering children. We needed to get offenders to build their own jails. Preferably underwater. All foreigners should be drowned at birth. He had always known Labour was soft on crime.
Take Lord Timpson. A bleeding heart liberal who believed in rehabilitation. It was time to lock people up for life on suspicion of not being English. Mostly, Honest Bob wanted politicians who had waved through a planning application from a party donor that had been turned down by the local authority to face the firing squad. Whoever could he have in mind?
Tory Desmond Swayne rather agreed. He was worried that people weren't serving enough of their sentences. It was time that criminals learned that a 20-year sentence actually meant 25. Otherwise, it was hard to guess which of his MPs he was trying to appeal to. Those like John Glen and Mark Pritchard have wised up that a kneejerk lurch to the right on every issue is not a good look. They were more or less behind the government's review.
As for Mahmood, she just told it as it was. The Tories had left the prison system on the verge of collapse. Had only built 500 new spaces in 14 years. Labour would do better. Was doing better. Had deported more foreigners than the Tories. But still something needed to give. Hence early release and better tagging. Especially for women. Chemical castration for some sex offenders. This went down very well with Mike Tapp. He is the Alan B'Stard of Labour's 2024 intake. Draped in a flag, standing on the White Cliff and having it in for foreigners. What's not to love?
That just left Kemi and the rest of the Tories to grumble about one further act of surrender. Not another one! For, after a 12-hour delay in the high court, the government's Chagos deal was finally concluded. And even though most Conservative MPs had never been able to locate the Chagos Islands on a map before they became newsworthy, they were adamant this was a capitulation of the highest order.
Never mind that the Tory government had started the negotiations a while back. Never mind that the international and UK courts had approved the deal. Never mind that all our allies had given the deal their blessing. Somehow the Tories – and presumably Nigel Farage, if he hadn't been busy lying on a 'sunbed' in France – knew best. As Starmer and John Healey were quick to point out in their hastily arranged press conference, it was Russia, China and Iran who were opposed to the deal. Whose side would you rather be on.
Yeah but no but yeah but no but surrender, mumbled Kemi. Always surrender. A life lived in a permanent state of betrayal. Mainly a betrayal of her own intelligence. Recess can't come soon enough.