Bons mots and easy wins – but Badenoch needs to be a little bit more convincing

Kemi Badenoch managed to get a standing ovation for opening a door. Merely entering the room at the Institute of Directors – which sounds like a shadowy Bond villain organisation – got the assembled loyalists on their feet and cheering.

Normally, with a government made up of talents like Ed Miliband and Rachel Reeves, a leader of the opposition might be able to luxuriate in such easy wins.

However, with Reform not so much snapping at the heels but threatening to eat the whole leg, Kemi would need to be a little bit more convincing to really earn those claps.

She began with the diagnosis: too difficult to buy a house, job creation bound by red tape, soaring immigration, successive political failures by both parties. It was hardly anything new: there are single-cell amoebas who have come to the same blatantly obvious conclusion.

Kemi added an extra diagnosis, however. While it was tempting to feel sorry for the Government, Sir Keir himself was part of the problem: “it’s legalism, not leadership,” she intoned.

She did acknowledge that Conservatives themselves had been part of the problem; hammering not just the multi-clown car pile-up that is the current Labour frontbench but also Ghosts of Tories Past; Theresa May and net zero, Brexiteers who’d left the EU “without a plan for growth”.

Kemi made a virtue of her own willingness to admit this. The question of what had gone wrong was answered again, ad infinitum. The question of what she’s actually going to do about it remains pretty much anyone’s guess.

Her delivery is interesting. There has clearly been a concerted effort to keep her bearing calm and collected. The leader of the opposition thus gave the impression of someone constantly trying to sound measured, but not always succeeding.

She is an almost-boiled kettle, a human beta-blocker. This perhaps explains her plodding delivery; imagine a traffic warden reading someone their rights before escalating an issue with their superiors.

The media Q&A proved spicier. One reporter asked her to comment on the news that Yvette Cooper had decided to, in the words of her boss, jump on the “far-Right bandwagon” by announcing a few local inquiries into the grooming gangs scandal. Only a full national inquiry would do, insisted Kemi, trying to look steely.

Should the PM sack Reeves, asked another reporter. “Keir’s woman problem is not my concern,” chuckled Kemi.

Inevitably, the next questioner asked why Reeves’s gender was relevant at all (which was odd because Reeves famously never, ever mentions being a woman).

The ghost of a smirk appeared at this perfectly teed-up question. “Well, when [Reeves] stood up in her Budget, she wanted everyone to know that she was the first female Chancellor,” said Kemi. “When you open the door to those things, it means that people can comment on them.”

All in all, an accomplished performance but this being CCHQ – whose operation makes the Chuckle Brothers look like Mossad – further hiccups were inevitable.

A gleeful Nigel Farage reminded his X followers that “a total of 21 people are currently watching Kemi Badenoch’s speech on Facebook and her YouTube stream crashed”.

You could imagine him writing this, pint in hand and grinning like the Cheshire Cat on Prozac. It’ll take more than some fine words and a dodgy livestream to wipe the smile off Farage’s face anytime soon.