Ah, the weekly parliamentary ritual of PMQs—that sacred half-hour where the nation’s finest minds gather to discuss the most pressing crises facing Britain, usually via the medium of wildly tangential insults.
This week, Kemi Badenoch decided to connect the dots between North Sea oil licensing, the 2015 general election, and the sentencing of Russell Brand to 10-and-a-half years in prison. Because when you are debating the future of British energy policy, the logical rhetorical bridge is obviously a decade-old YouTube interview in Ed Miliband’s kitchen.
According to parliamentary reports, Badenoch used her questions to remind the House that during the 2015 campaign, Miliband appeared on Brand’s show The Trews—a broadcast remembered largely for Miliband awkwardly trying to adopt a mockney accent while discussing wealth redistribution. Badenoch argued that because Miliband thought “cosying up to Russell Brand would make him prime minister,” his judgment on North Sea oil fields cannot be trusted.
What makes the routine particularly bold is the timing. Just 24 hours earlier at a press conference, Badenoch had reportedly taken the high road, suggesting it would be disrespectful to Brand’s victims to use his conviction for cheap political point-scoring. Evidently, the high road suffered from severe congestion overnight, because by Wednesday lunchtime she had taken a sharp detour straight back into the Westminster mud.
Labour MPs greeted the pivot with loud shouts of “shame,” which Badenoch cheerfully redirected toward the Foreign Secretary. Meanwhile, Prime Minister Andy Burnham opted for the classic Westminster dodge: completely ignoring the jibe and talking exclusively about oil and gas regulations, leaving the Hansard transcribers to wonder how on earth they were going to index this one.
It is a bold move for any Conservative leader to play the game of “guilt by retrospective association,” especially when your own political North Star is Margaret Thatcher—a woman whose 1980s guest list now reads like a particularly grim episode of Unsolved Mysteries.
If Kemi Badenoch wants to establish a strict Westminster rule that a politician’s judgment is permanently voided by whoever they once shared a cup of tea with, she might want to quietly hide the Downing Street visitor logs from 1979 to 1990.
Jimmy Savile. Ed Miliband did one awkward YouTube interview in a kitchen. Margaret Thatcher invited Jimmy Savile to Chequers for Christmas—repeatedly. While civil servants spent the 1980s frantically waving red flags and begging her not to give him a knighthood, Thatcher brushed them aside, got him his “Sir,” and put him in charge of a task force at Broadmoor Hospital. It makes a 15-minute chat about wealth redistribution look like a minor clerical error.
General Augusto Pinochet. When Chilean military dictator Augusto Pinochet was arrested in London in 1998 for human rights abuses, Thatcher didn’t just distance herself—she popped round to his rented mansion in Surrey with a bottle of single malt whisky and thanked him for “bringing democracy to Chile.” Most people bring grapes when visiting a friend under house arrest; Thatcher brought geopolitical absolution for a military junta.
Saddam Hussein. Throughout the 1980s, Thatcher’s government cheerfully extended trade credits and export licences to Baghdad, helping arm Saddam Hussein’s regime while he was busy invading Iran. It was less “cosying up” and more “providing the hardware,” right up until the exact moment he invaded Kuwait and suddenly became a villain.
Westminster has always suffered from selective amnesia, of course. In the great British tradition of political point-scoring, an opponent’s past handshake is a fatal flaw in their character, while your own hero’s decade-long friendship with a war criminal or a serial offender is simply “complex historical context.”
Prime Minister’s Questions (PMQs) is famous for producing high-stakes political boomerangs—moments where a pre-planned zinger, an ill-judged brag, or a poorly researched attack immediately collapses in the chamber.
