From the offensive to the bizarre
Kemi Badenoch has announced the shadow cabinet – her top team who will be going head to head with Labour’s frontbench in the House of Commons. Among those appointed are some familiar faces as well as some completely unknown Tories.
The new shadow cabinet has a range of characters who’ve made some outlandish comments, from the offensive to the bizarre. Here are the ten wildest of them.
1. Kemi Badenoch’s comments on maternity pay
Let’s start at the top. During the Tory leadership campaign, Kemi Badenoch caused a stir for the views she expressed on maternity pay in the UK. Speaking to Times Radio, Badenoch said: “Maternity pay varies, depending on who you work for – but statutory maternity pay is a function of tax, tax comes from people who are working.
“We’re taking from one group of people and giving to another. This, in my view, is excessive.”
The UK has one of the lowest rates of maternity pay in the OECD. Does that sound excessive?
2. Priti Patel’s support for the death penalty
Priti Patel, now the shadow foreign secretary, is known for being on the extreme right of the Tories. There’s a litany of controversies and contentious statements to her name.
Perhaps the most infamous one comes from 2011, when on an episode of the BBC’s Question Time, she argued for the reintroduction of the death penalty.
Patel said: “I do actually think when we have a criminal justice system that continuously fails in this country and where we have seen murderers, rapists and people who have committed the most abhorrent crimes in society, go into prison and then are released from prison to go out into the community to then re-offend and do the types of crime they have committed again and again.
“I think that’s appalling. And actually on that basis alone I would actually support the reintroduction of capital punishment to serve as a deterrent.”
Yikes.
3. Chris Philp asking whether Rwanda and Congo are different countries
In April 2023, Chris Philp made an appearance on BBC Question Time. He was a policing minister at the time, but high on the agenda that night was the government’s flagship migration policy – the Rwanda deportation scheme.
You’d hope, given that he is now the shadow home secretary and therefore responsible for responding to government migration policy, that Philp would be on top of the detail. Alas, that didn’t seem to be the case.
After being asked whether an audience member’s relatives in the Congo would be deported to Rwanda if they arrived in the UK, Philp replied “I think there’s an exclusion for people from Rwanda being sent to Rwanda”, to which the audience member had to correct him, and repeated that his family are from the Congo, not Rwanda. Philp, who seemed confused by the question, said: “Rwanda is a different country from Congo isn’t it?”
Maybe Tory MPs should stop appearing on Question Time…
4. Robert Jenrick claimed pensioners are waking up with illegal immigrants in their bedrooms
Given the Tories’ obsession with spreading misinformation and stoking division on migration, it’s no wonder that a number of the entries on this list relate to that topic. Enter Robert Jenrick – Kemi Badenoch’s leadership rival and now shadow justice secretary.
During his bid for the leadership, Jenrick gave his opinions on the topic in an interview with LBC. In that interview, Jenrick claimed to have ‘met pensioners who had illegal migrants in their bedrooms when they woke up in the morning.’
Who needs Donald Trump when you’ve got Robert Jenrick?
5. Laura Trott’s comments on disabled people working from home
In 2023, Laura Trott – who has been announced as Kemi Badenoch’s new shadow education secretary – made comments which were widely condemned by disability charities. In advance of the then chancellor Jeremy Hunt announcing changes to the welfare system, Trott said that disabled people should do ‘their duty’ by seeking to find work they could do from home.
Disability groups described those comments as ‘damaging’ and ‘absurd’.
6. Kevin Hollinrake’s defence of Frank Hester’s apology
The major Tory donor Frank Hester hit the headlines earlier this year after he was alleged to have said that Diane Abbott ‘should be shot’ and that seeing her on TV ‘made you hate all black women’.
Kevin Hollinrake, Kemi Badenoch’s new shadow levelling up, housing and communities secretary, was tasked with doing the media rounds after that story broke.
As well as saying that he’d be happy for the Tories to take more money from Hester (which they would go on to do), he told LBC: “If you say racist things and don’t apologise for them that would make you a racist, but I think if you say something racist and then apologise, that’s a different thing.”
Okay then.
7. Victoria Atkins wanting to ban doctors from wearing Palestinian flags
During the general election campaign, the then health secretary Victoria Atkins gave an interview with the Jewish Chronicle. In that interview, she made a crucial announcement of her party’s health policy. She wanted to ban doctors from wearing Palestinian flags.
She implied that doing so would be part of policies to tackle antisemitism, saying she was: “determined to ensure that Jewish people feel as safe in our healthcare system as they should in the rest of society”.
Later, she went on to say: “I’ve already been in conversations with NHS England about how we can ensure that uniforms are free political and flags, and this goes across the board [sic]. Our hospitals, surgeries and other healthcare settings should not be places where individuals express their political views, but environments that enable people simply to get health care quickly and safely.”
Now she’s Kemi Badenoch’s shadow environment secretary, we can all look forward to seeing what she’ll try to ban farmers from wearing.
8. Helen Whateley claiming covid test and trace system was working when it demonstrably wasn’t
In 2023, the Telegraph published a series of damning WhatsApp messages from Matt Hancock’s phone. Many of them were sent to or came from Helen Whateley, who was a care minister at the time.
In September 2020, people were being asked to travel up to hundreds of miles to secure Covid-19 tests.
Whateley messaged Hancock at the time to say that the system was ‘definitely working’. She sent that message after having to make a 100 mile round trip in order to get a test for somebody self-isolating at home.
Sounds like it was working, right?
9. Gareth Bacon’s food bank comments
Between 2010 and 2024, the number of food bank parcels given out in the UK increased from 60,000 to over 3 million. Some have argued that this might have something to do with the devastating austerity project and the punitive approach to welfare that the Tories instigated while in office.
Not Gareth Bacon – the new shadow transport secretary. In 2023, he argued that people who use foodbanks ‘will have to look at how they manage their personal finances’.
Speaking on the BBC’s Politics Live, Bacon said: “People will say they don’t have enough money but… sometimes people will have to look at how they manage their personal finances and there’s nothing wrong in that, that is not in anyway a criticism of anyone and it’s not patronising to say so.”
Not patronising at all Gareth…
10. Mims Davies struggles to answer the same question six times in a row
Mims Davies might not be a household name, but she’s now been given two shadow ministerial jobs by Kemi Badenoch. She’s both the shadow Wales secretary and the shadow minister for women.
It’s not her first frontbench ministerial job either. She’s had a handful of junior ministerial positions over the last few years.
Her time as employment minister might not have been her finest hour though. When in that post, she gave an interview to Times Radio as the fallout of the partygate scandal rumbled on.
That interview went from absurd to excruciating as she was asked no less than six times whether she supported Boris Johnson in a vote of no confidence. Suffice to say, she found this question challenging as she repeatedly stated “I voted according to what I thought was right”.
At least she’s now well trained in refusing to answer basic questions from journalists…
Chris Jarvis is head of stratcegy and development at Left Foot Forward
Image credit: HM Treasury – Creative Commons
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