QUENTIN LETTS: Blimey, Kemi went for it. And a black woman saying anti-racism wasn't the most important thing fried her opponents' brains

Daily Mail​

5 hours ago

With Sir Keir Starmer on one of his foreign jaunts – it feels a bad time to be abroad – Kemi Badenoch seized the moment.
The Government was abandoning another policy position, this time on the child-rapes scandal. Sir Keir was in a distant time-zone when the cave-in was announced to the Commons.
The Tories ' response would normally have been made by Shadow Home Secretary Chris Philp. Handsome lad but a touch blurty. Mrs Badenoch sensed an opportunity. Mr Philp was demoted to note-taker and his party leader replaced him at the despatch box.
Blimey, she went for it. She tore into liberal queasiness about investigating gangs of 'Asian and Pakistani heritage men'.
This was the phrase Whitehall had chiselled out of granite for the occasion. Home Secretary Yvette Cooper, making the announcement, resorted to a hammy mixture of sad-voice, prickly self-defence and antiseptic precision. 'We want to put them behind bars,' she said of the offenders. Every consonant was accentuated.
Mrs Badenoch didn't buy the tough-guy act. 'She speaks as if this was their plan all along but we all know it's another U-turn,' she murmured in her smoky voice. Yvette sounded squeaky by comparison.
Labour MPs started stirring. A blowhard from Bracknell, name of Swallow, was reprimanded by Speaker Hoyle for 'bawling' at her. Mrs Badenoch was only energised. Another Labour figure itching and gurning and jawing and rolling her eyes throughout was Jess Phillips, safeguarding minister.
Deputy PM Angela Rayner and Education Secretary Bridget Phillipson sat rigid. Lucy Powell, the Leader of the House who had once mocked Tory requests for an inquiry, sucked her gnashers. But Ms Phillips could not contain herself. She pulled faces to indicate that she thought opposition MPs were dim. She shrugged, laughed repeatedly and muttered asides to a neighbour. Mrs Badenoch sailed through it. She has a Nigerian Right-winger's contempt for Lefty hand-wringing. It fries her opponents' minds. You can sense their inner microchips overloading with the conundrum: a black woman saying anti-racism should not have been the predominant concern? Computer not recognise. The chamber filled with the smell of hot Scalextric wire as Lefties' synapses fused.
She was angry that the absent Sir Keir just a few weeks ago dismissed calls for an inquiry as 'a bandwagon of the far-Right'. Yet now the nasal knight had done a reverse ferret, a volte-face, a gymnastic flip-and-twist whereby he was now facing in completely the other direction, arms held wide, grinning at his feat. 'An extraordinary failure of leadership!' she cried.
Volume levels were rising. Mrs Badenoch relished it. Her eyes, behind their big glasses, bulged like two Rosey Apple boiled sweets. She hollered that Labour MPs voted three times to block an inquiry – 'three times!' – but were now professing delight that one would be happening.
Her right arm sawed and stirred and jabbed and flew horizontally. We were almost in Margaret Hilda territory, although in place of Mrs T's blonde barnet the most noticeable thing here was the gap between Mrs Badenoch's front teeth and her pulsating denunciation of the Starmerites. 'What changed the Prime Minister's mind from thinking this is far-Right dog whistle politics to thinking it was something he must do?'
And she wanted action against those in 'the police, local authorities, social service, or even the Crown Prosecution Service' who had put concerns about community ahead of stopping girls as young as ten from being raped. Even the CPS? Who can she have in mind?
The following pupils appeared to be absent: Farage, N. (Clacton), Champion, S. (Rotherham) and, more surprisingly, Lowe, R. (Great Yarmouth).
Jonathan Brash (Lab, Hartlepool) accused Mrs Badenoch of 'weaponising child rape to go after clicks'. A particularly damp Lib Dem, Josh Babarinde (Eastbourne), accused Mrs Badenoch of being 'party political'.
In the Commons? That's the whole point of the place, poppet. Party politics is only despicable when it distorts justice. As we now can see.