Performative Tories voted for his or her puppet Badenoch to do their soiled work

Some things are performative. Like Prince William’s presenting himself as the saviour of homelessness while a Channel 4 Dispatches investigation reveals his dad’s property business includes billions of pounds worth of real estate in London alone.

Like Spain’s Prime Minister and other leaders visiting flood-hit Valencia at the weekend – where more than 200 people were killed – to supposedly boost morale when they could have prevented the tragedy with better warning systems and provided more support in the immediate aftermath.

Robert Jenrick’s corporate lawyer wife Michal Berkner struggles to do performative.

Her applause during the standing ovation for her husband’s arch-rival Kemi Badenoch, confirmed as the new Tory leader, reeked of the fixed face saccharine reactions from the losing nominees at the Oscars who know the camera is still on them.

If you want a laugh, check out the moment Michal grew fed up of faking it and stopped. Then carried on as the ovation continued, clearly fuming, because she knew she had to.

As for the rest of the Tories, they’ve done performative for years. Especially the ones gushing over Badenoch as their leader while the stench of their rancid politics of racism, xenophobia and division keeps them out of government.

We’ve done this subject here before but I’ll say it a little louder for the people at the back: Olukemi Olufunto Adegoke Badenoch is not a success story for diversity.

And spare me that patronising nonsense that, whatever my politics, I have to applaud her election.

The only people pushing that view have either status or profile already, or have not been negatively affected in the way that ordinary people of colour will be by Badenoch’s willingness to run cover for the naked racism rampant on the right of the Tory party.

She told the BBC on Sunday morning that her election shows the UK is a place “where it doesn’t matter who you are or what you look like”.

Er… come off it, Kemi. You wouldn’t have come within a million miles of the job had you not been as willing as you are to say the kind of things that would see a white politician widely vilified. You’re hardly Rosa Parks.

And that’s the point. You can only judge someone on their politics.

The easy thing would be to throw social media garlands at Badenoch’s feet as some opposition MPs and commentators who clink glasses in Commons bars within the Westminster bubble away from the cameras have done.

But they aren’t the ordinary people whose daily lives will be made a misery by the racism, bigotry and hate that Badenoch whips up.

She still wants to ship migrants to Rwanda. She still believes “not all cultures are equally valid”.

She dismissed as “trivia” the row over Tory donor Frank Hester claiming that seeing Labour MP Diane Abbott made him want to hate all Black women – and that Diane should be shot.

She continually misrepresents the harm of colonialism and the transatlantic slave trade.

She is the UK version of the American failed Republican primary candidate Vivek Ramaswamy, so willing to soak himself in xenophobia that back in May that he actually praised conservative commentator Ann Coulter for telling him – to his face – that she wouldn’t have voted for him “because you’re an Indian”.

Yes. Really.

Badenoch derides diversity drives and debunks the things we know to be barriers to ordinary people of colour progressing in life.

She sought to make it illegal for teachers to teach about the facts of systemic racism that her own government’s race report had to publish.

She is there so that Tories and commentators who would divide us can claim: “Well it was a Black person who said it, so how can it be racist?”

Those clutching their pearls at that are the same people who would have you (and themselves) believe that if she can make it to such a position, anyone can.

That if you disagree with her appointment then *you’re* the problem because you obviously think she is “the wrong kind of Black person”.

Labour MPs deleting their hard-hitting takes on her are not doing so because they are untrue.

They are doing so because they’d rather not deal with the hysteria of a media and political class with its own lack of diversity. You’ll hear and see a lot of performative tut-tutting there too.

Labour’s high command can hardly hammer its MPs when it was shamed by its lack of new, younger, Black male MP’s to fight the last election. There’ll be no freshening up of the government front bench in that regard any time soon.

But the truth is this: You don’t have to be Black to be utterly appalled by the rhetoric and the positions Badenoch takes on a variety of race-related issues.

We all know how it ends anyway.

In 2019, ex-Home Secretary Sajid Javid defended then-Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s use of the terms ‘“bank robber” and “letterbox” to describe Muslim women wearing the burqa.

That same year, Javid was blocked from Donald Trump’s state banquet while junior ministers from this country were invited.

When push came to shove Javid would find himself out in the cold.

Despite being the child of migrants, Rishi Sunak’s government created a string of measures to reduce legal migration and send asylum seekers to Rwanda. His and his party’s rhetoric while in power emboldened so much more of the bold-faced, racist rhetoric we see in political life today.

Yet by the end, Reform UK leader Nigel Farage, admired by many in the Tory government Sunak led, accused the former PM of not understanding “our culture” in June.

Grassroots Tory members were calling up radio stations by the end to claim Sunak “isn’t even British in most people’s opinion”.

Even below the congratulatory tweet from Labour MP and fellow Nigerian Florence Eshalomi to Badenoch on Saturday, were disgusting, racist responses aimed at the new Tory leader, most declaring they would not vote for her.

So Badenoch should enjoy it while it lasts. She is a gift for this Labour government in that within 24 hours of her election she was on telly declaring Partygate was “overblown”. Her comments on wanting to cut maternity pay won’t go away any time soon either.

And, dripping with arrogance and entitlement, even those championing her now will soon be telling us how appalled they are by her politics.

So yes, she may have saved us from the psychopathic Jenrick. But mercies don’t come much smaller.