With the Brexit reset, Kemi Badenoch has been stitched up like a kipper

So the Tories are now in fourth place in the opinion polls, on all of 16 per cent – just behind the Liberal Democrats and Labour, with Nigel Farage’s Reform UK fully 13 points ahead of the “official” opposition party. Yet no one is, or should be, very surprised.

Yesterday, as part of my own official duties, I watched the Conservatives’ press conference on Keir Starmer’s Brexit “reset” deal. It was a deeply dispiriting experience, and should be enough to make any remaining Conservative – indeed, any democrat – despair.

Scythes glinting, in rode what felt like the Three Tory Horsewomen of the Brexit Apocalypse – Kemi Badenoch, Priti Patel and Victoria Atkins – crying betrayal, surrender and backsliding. They’re the leader of the opposition, shadow foreign secretary and the shadow secretary responsible for food imports, for the avoidance of doubt. (Apparently, some focus group participants have actually still never heard of Badenoch.)

This was the most strident performance from a bunch of frontbenchers I’ve seen in a long time – possibly ever – as they tried to outdo each other in scorn for Starmer’s latest trade deal. No one does disdain like Patel.

The rhetoric ricocheted around the room, each of these supposedly serious politicians making the most terrifying predictions for the fate of the nation once we have easier veterinary checks at the border, safeguard British steel exports from new EU rules and tariffs, and remove unnecessary checks on food and drink exports in both directions.

Only the easier access for passport holders at e-gates and smoother transit for domestic animals were given even a grudging welcome – because Badenoch’s Tories aren’t daft enough to attack our pets. I suspect that, to its concerned owner, the welfare and happiness of their cockapoo rank higher than the theoretical dangers of dynamic alignment on sanitary and phyto-sanitary regulations.

The main problem was that the Conservative midweights either hadn’t read the Common Understanding document, or hadn’t understood it – or if they had, they just didn’t care. Hence, their tendency to lapse into common misunderstandings of it.

Badenoch at one stage, with typical overconfidence, declared that millions of young Europeans are about to turn up in Britain – the successful invasion of a multinational force of continental au pairs ready to conquer these islands where Napoleon, the Kaiser and Hitler failed. This, Badenoch remarked, was because the new youth mobility scheme – or “youth experience scheme”, as we are now to call it, in euphemistic Eurospeak – was “uncapped”.

And yet one of the few things the government is actually clear about is that it is very definitely capped – just like other similar schemes for Australia, Japan and Uruguay, for example, about which no one made any fuss at all.

This was not a persuasive session. The three frontbenchers posed as vicious, Cerberus-style defenders of the Ark of the Brexit Covenant, circling around Boris Johnson’s botched 2020 deal as if it were the last word in brilliant diplomacy and contained the very soul of the country. An attack on Brexit is an attack on Britain, they seemed to be saying. In doing so, they have positioned themselves, albeit passionately, on the wrong side of British public opinion, which has decided that it is a disaster and a clown show.

Badenoch, Patel and Atkins behave as though Brexit was wildly, overwhelmingly popular – it never was – and that if they posed as its doughty defenders, they’d win votes off Reform. But of course they won’t, because they can never out-Farage Farage, as recent election and polling results suggest.

Besides, Atkins, unlike the other two, was once a convinced Remainer, who said in 2016: “The Leave campaign has no plan for what will follow a vote to leave. They have no unified vision of the trade deal the UK should seek with the EU.” Prescient words there from Vicky, now freighted with an especially piquant irony for the woman who finds herself a member of the shadow cabinet in a rabidly Leave party.

As a former Cameron centrist, she finds herself in her present role up against virtually the entirety of British business, which backs Starmer’s “reset”: the British Chambers of Commerce, Confederation of British Business, Institute of Directors, UK Steel, UK Hospitality, the British Meat Processors Association, Morrisons, BAE Systems, Salmon Scotland and Port of Dover. She can’t be comfortable. She certainly didn't look it in the presser.

Worst of all, without many of the details yet known, Badenoch and her colleagues pledged to reverse the Brexit reset just as soon as they return to government. So with crashing incompetence, they’ve promised to abolish any of the genuine and popular gains that might emerge from Starmer’s negotiations.

These Tories, who purport to govern a troubled nation, sound extreme, cranky and impetuous. George Osborne, the former chancellor, had warned them that by resetting relations with the EU, Starmer was setting an “easy trap” for Badenoch to fall into, making it impossible for the Tories to attack the new arrangements, and enabling Labour to accuse them of wanting to erect more pointless obstacles to trade, growth and prosperity in the name of some abstruse (and misunderstood) concept of sovereignty.

Why make the lives of farmers and exporters more difficult? Put jobs at risk? The Tories have stitched themselves up like a kipper (or Ukipper). And Badenoch keeps claiming that it’s far too early for her to make manifesto promises...

The voters, so wary of the Brexit wars, would probably have preferred Badenoch and co to say that they’d study the Common Understanding carefully, support sensible measures on practical grounds, and seek to improve areas which raised serious questions. And leave it at that. Instead, they were sprayed with bile.

This, then, is the state of Britain’s alternative government. To be fair to her, at least, Patel had managed to rethink her lines by the time she did her interview on the Today programme, stressing instead how much detail was missing from the “deal” and declining to commit herself too early to specific policies.

But it is too late. The Conservative pledge to scrap the reset has been made, and it is now the opposition who have to answer the awkward questions about what they’d do instead – just as they have to find ways to justify cutting the taxes that Labour have increased, and to specify where they’d cut public services.

The trouble with being the official opposition, as opposed to a professional grievance-farmer like Farage, is that the public needs to be convinced that you might have some solutions to the country’s problems. It’s no good just moaning.