In her maiden Commons speech in 2017, Kemi Badenoch, quoting Woody Allen, said that democracy was like sex: “If it’s not messy, you’re not doing it right”. Seven years on, Conservative politics could hardly be messier.
Touring the studios on Sunday, the Business and Trade Secretary urged those Tories plotting to oust Rishi Sunak to “stop messing around”. She had, she told the BBC’s Laura Kuenssberg, phoned Sir Simon Clarke, who last week called for the PM to be replaced, and advised the former levelling up secretary to “stop what he was doing”.
