Kemi Badenoch’s early troubles are no reason to despair

A consensus seems to be forming, with unreasonable speed, that Kemi Badenoch isn’t exactly smashing it at Prime Minister’s Questions. Much of the harsher criticism comes from expected quarters – ‘Tory Gloom as Gaffe-Prone Kemi Badenoch Endures Another Miserable PMQs’ says a headline in the Huffington Post, while John Crace snarks in the Guardian that ‘Kemi Badenoch is turning out to be the gift that keeps on giving… to the Labour party.’  On the James O’Brien show there was a ‘more-in-pity-than-contempt’ snigger-fest between the host and political editor Natasha Clark: ‘Are we flirting with the possibility that she actually did better last week?’ the host chortled gleefully.

Such pundits, of course, were never going to be generous to Badenoch as leader, whatever she did. Yet even in The Spectator, there’s a less than rapturous response, with Lloyd Evans slamming the new Tory leader two consecutive Wednesdays as appearing, in her clashes with Keir Starmer, ‘snippy’, ‘childish’ and all ‘at sea’.