An interesting speech full of hard truths? Kemi Badenoch is clearly rattled | Gaby Hinsliff
The Tory leader gave an address that was full of candour about her party’s failures. You can sense Nigel Farage’s delight
Well, finally. Only eight years on from kneecapping the economy and crowing “you lost, get over it” at anyone impertinent enough to notice, a Conservative party leader has tacitly admitted the painfully obvious : Brexit was an act of wilful negligence by a government that dragged Britain out of its most important trading relationship “before we had a plan for growth outside the EU”. There wasn’t a considered Plan B, just a government frantically trying to catch itself up as it went along. And that’s only the start of it, Kemi Badenoch argued this week, in the first interesting thing the Conservative party has had to say to the nation since its bone-crushing defeat.
Successive Conservative governments dating back to David Cameron’s had promised to get immigration down but hadn’t thought through how to do that either, she pointed out, and consequently achieved the opposite. (You may well think the country would be even worse off had they succeeded but, either way, whipping up public anger against something and then blithely delivering more of it is the height of irresponsibility.) They bound themselves in law to achieving net zero by 2050 but only worried afterwards about how exactly they might do it. Each time, she conceded, Conservative governments told voters what they wanted to hear and gambled on working it all out later.
Gaby Hinsliff is a Guardian columnist