Kemi Badenoch to channel her inner dame at PMQs

Times

a day ago

Kemi Badenoch thinks she's cracked PMQs after a choppy start to her weekly duels with Sir Keir Starmer. The Tory leader believes she was too much like a lawyer, and she needs to channel her inner dame. 'I realised this isn't a courtroom where I'm prosecuting a witness — it's a panto,' she told The Political Party at the Duchess Theatre. She may find that PMQs is not the only part of parliament which is like a panto. After all Kemi, where is the biggest threat to your leadership? Badenoch's attempt to be more mainstream is being helped by her children, who are broadening her tastes in popular culture. Her son has taken her to a football match while her daughter has introduced her to the music of Taylor Swift, though they're yet to see the singer live. Badenoch said: 'Rachel Reeves took all the tickets.'
Tory transports of delight
With some ministers disgruntled by the spending review, reshuffle rumours are swirling, but the former Tory minister Greg Hands warns that a beleaguered premiership can make strange decisions. He discovered this when Theresa May asked him to become a transport minister. 'I replied that I couldn't drive, couldn't ride a bike and was one of four government ministers given a derogation to oppose government policy on Heathrow expansion,' Hands said. May let him keep his job at trade, but he wasn't the first Tory to be baffled by the suggestion of a job at transport. When Margaret Thatcher sent Ken Clarke there in 1979 he told her he knew nothing about transport. 'My dear boy,' she said tersely. 'You will pick it up!'
• What will be in the spending review? The winners and losers
Euphemisms around death often irk more than they soothe and, on that point, the former Newsnight journalist Michael Crick has made his wishes clear. 'If anybody uses the word 'pass' when I die, then I promise that my ghost will come back to haunt them,' he said. ''Passing' is for footballers.' Something to remember when he reaches full-time.
Herbal diarrhoea
The producer Cameron Mackintosh may have a magic touch in the theatre, but that hasn't necessarily extended to the garden. While his Somerset home has wonderful greenery, it is tended to by his partner, Michael Le Poer Trench, who tells Country Life that the theatre impresario turns into Mrs Malaprop when dealing with things horticultural. Hellebores, for instance, become 'herbivores', though this is not as alarming a confusion as the time Mackintosh meant epimedium but instead said 'Imodium'.
Forsyth right on target
As a creature of the Cold War it was fitting that Frederick Forsyth had works banned by both the Russians and the Americans, though the latter did it only in their Guantanamo Bay prison for alleged terrorists. 'I suspect the Americans have banned The Kill List because it might give the detainees ideas,' the author, who died this week, said in 2014. His masterpiece The Day of the Jackal was never published in the USSR, though the Soviets were very keen on the story of an assassination attempt on a French statesman right up to the point that someone had a pop at Brezhnev. Suddenly, the launch party was off. As Forsyth noted: 'Authoritarian systems don't like people to speak about how to kill the boss.'