In light of, by Twitter’s common consensus, one of the worst political interviews of all time, it’s a good time to ask why Kemi Badenoch made Priti Patel Shadow Foreign Secretary in the first place.
Having only won the votes of 14 MPs in the only round of last year’s leadership election that she survived, Patel was hardly the biggest rival that Badenoch needed to placate. Her decision to offer her a more senior job than other, more successful candidates needlessly irritated many. More importantly, it meant her Shadow Foreign Secretary had serious baggage attached.
When Patel’s political obituary comes to be written – sooner than she might hope – she will be remembered for two big things: being sacked as International Development Secretary for meeting with Israeli officials without Prime Ministerial approval, and for presiding over the introduction of our most liberal immigration system ever, with disastrous consequences at the ballot box.
When confronted by Harry Cole with a graph of the immigration explosion – the so-called Boriswave – that occurred under her at the Home Office, Patel had two options. She could hold her hands up, follow her leader’s example, and offer an apology, however heartfelt, for her career-defining cock-up. Or she could be unrepentant, unwilling to admit that she wasted her three years.
She chose the latter route. Watch the clip, if you dare. I recommend doing so from behind the sofa.
Patel has since sought to clarify her comments, even if sorry remains the hardest word. But it’s no use. People voted to Leave for a variety of reasons, as our proprietor’s polling reminds us. But no one doubts that a desire to control and reduce migration was central. That’s what Boris Johnson’s landslide-winning 2019 manifesto promised, and which Patel was tasked to implement.
She had one job, and she screwed it up spectacularly. Net migration in 2019, the year she became Home Secretary, was 184,000 – still far higher than anything Britain had known before Tony Blair entered Downing Street. But by 2022, the year Liz Truss dumped her from the Home Office, it had quadrupled to 764,000. A year later, it was 906,000 – about the population of Cyprus.
That is a case of “misunderstanding the brief” far more damning, consequential, and embarrassing than anything Lord Sugar’s latest ban of merrie muppets could ever manage. Leaving aside its ruinous consequences for our housing crisis, social services, infrastructure, public finances and more, this represented a fundamental breach with our voters. We treated them like idiots.
Reports differ as to who exactly the Guilty Men (and women!) of the Boriswave are. Was it Rishi Sunak, as part of a Treasury-brained attempt to bump up growth figures, dampen post-Covid inflation, and avoid paying social care workers more? Was it Boris Johnson, to apologise to his brother for backing Leave, and to get invited back to FT lunches? Or was it Patel, as Home Sec?
As I outlined for the Telegraph, I suspect that it was a collective cock-up. In my experience, most things in politics are explained by a combination of incompetence, laziness, and a total lack of foresight. A full investigation into the disaster, with a list of those at which we can throw tomatoes, is essential. Fortunately, about 70 per cent of my friendship group seems to be working on it.
Either way, Patel was the Home Secretary in charge of scrapping a migration target, junking a £30,000 minimum salary threshold, and loosening the requirements for overseas students and their dependents – the dicking around with the control rods that unleashed our immigration Chernobyl. The buck stopped with her. The graph that Cole showed her remains her political epitaph.
Even now Patel seems to wish to gaslight the electorate rather than confront the reality of her foul-up. Her claim that only the “brightest and best” were coming is nonsense. In the first six months of last year alone, there were four dependents for every health and care worker arriving. For workers from Zimbabwe, 1,063 health and care visas (likely minimum wage) brought 10, 670 dependents.
Even without her simultaneous failure to prevent small boat crossings from surging after she promised to make them “totally non-viable”, Patel’s fiasco represented a fundamental breach of trust with our 2019 voters. Research by both Onward and the Centre for Policy Studies have found immigration to be one of, if not the, number one reason for our defeat last summer.
As Gavin Rice explained, immigration was the number one reason in the massive 42-point loss in vote share amongst Leave voters that we saw in July. 40 per cent of defectors from 2019 named it as their largest barrier for voting Conservative again. No wonder Nigel Farage is so happy to dance with Patel – her appalling record was what drove Reform UK’s surge in support.
Drove, and drives. We not only shattered our 2019 promise but ripped it up and stamped on it. We tripled net migration from levels that caused our country to vote for Brexit, and hoped our supporters wouldn’t notice. Why should they trust us ever again? How can we ever be banked on to control and reduce immigration? Farage can point, laugh, and count his blessings.
Badenoch understands how existential this issue is for our party, even if she seems to be the only person in SW1 not to have read the excellent CPS paper on this topic from last year. As such, whilst she has offered a milquetoast mea culpa, our party still lacks a coherent analysis of what went wrong, and what we would do differently. This is the void into which Reform happily leaps.
I have the impression that Badenoch doesn’t wholly grasp what the voters understand by policy. It’s not 100-page documents, as essential as they are for any putative Project 2029 and for keeping my think-tank chums employed. It is what Farage offers – a diagnosis, and a cure. If we lack those, our poll ratings will continue to deteriorate, as Reform eat our lunch.
That is especially true if Badenoch plans to avoid policy announcements until 2027. For the nth time: politics is being played at ten times speed, we are in third and trending downwards, and we have no time to indulge in the Thatcher-Joseph cosplay that the Shadow Cabinet might yearn for. Our party is in a death spiral, a descent into irrelevance. Voters simply stopping listening.
The rot must be stopped, and fast. Badenoch must build on her previous speech to make a wholehearted denunciation of the Boriswave, and a full-bodied apology for Johnson and Patel’s mistakes. She must make a series of clear commitments – building on the work of Neil O’Brien, Robert Jenrick, Karl Williams, Guy Dampier, and others – to show that we are repentant.
Whether this will be enough to buy us a hearing from voters can’t be known until Badenoch tries it. If she does not, en masse defections to Reform will continue, and Tory MPs, members, and supporters will have to confront the reality that we are on track to become a minor party. Plugging the latest polls into Electoral Calculus almost makes Patel’s interview look good by comparison.
On which note, we return to the question with which I opened: why, with all the baggage she brings, did Badenoch think it wise to give Patel a senior role? This interview was an inevitability from the moment she was appointed. If Badenoch is going to hug close those responsible for the twin disasters of the Boriswave and our election defeat, she must explain why, and for what benefit.
We can’t be under new management if voters are seeing the same politicians defending the same appalling record that caused them to boot us out only six months ago. Patel had her chance, and failed. Badenoch may not want to reshuffle her Shadow Cabinet, but interviews like this make it an inevitability. Yesterday’s men and women have no place in the Brave New Right.
