An over-promoted middle manager

Senior Source, who is presumably a senior Tory MP, has an interesting Critic piece on Kemi Badenoch.

Badenoch must go

The hapless Conservative leader is consigning the party to complete irrelevance

She’s got to go. It’s a marker of how badly things are going for the Tories that I have to clarify which of my colleagues I’m talking about.

Last week, after a disastrous interview with Harry Cole, in which she tried to not only defend the Boriswave but demand an apology from those who criticised her, the calls began for Priti Patel to resign. This was understandable. Priti was a terrible appointment in the first place, one that baffled almost everyone, but her continuing on the front bench after that interview will cause incalculable damage. It’s difficult to imagine anything more contradictory to winning back voters’ trust than the guilty figures of the old regime using their positions on the shadow front bench to justify the most disgraceful aspects of their legacy.

The whole piece is well worth reading, because we may be witnessing the collapse of a major UK political party. Perhaps the Tory future not quite as dramatic as collapse, but with a floundering Labour party and irrelevant Lib Dems, the incompetence of our political establishment is impossible to miss.

I was also told that, as an engineer, she would be able to fix the party machinery. CCHQ has been so badly run that they’re incapable of renewing the lease at Matthew Parker Street. This is symbolic of an organisation that has completely collapsed — well before her time, and not something I assign any blame to her for. But keeping the building requires donors, who she is terrible at dealing with; at the latest event she turned up late, left early and forgot to ask for any money. Her answer to getting the operation back on track is an all-staff meeting to say they “must do better”. This is wrong on three levels; first, the hard-working will resent being lumped in with the lazy; secondly, the lazy won’t respond to a pep talk; thirdly, everyone will resent being blamed for your lack of cut-through, particularly given you are so well-known for being lazy.

This smacks so strongly of an over-promoted middle manager because, at the end of the day, that’s what she is.