I listened to the Badenoch speech for as long as I could bear it. I've always had misgivings about her because I don't believe she is meaningfully British. Whatever her travel document says, her formative years were not spent in this country. She is not a product of this country or its culture. And though she may physically inhabit this island, she does not live in any contemporary version of it that I recognise.
This was the sort of speech I might have been impressed with twenty years ago, but Britain is not just in the doldrums from a spell of mismanagement. While everyday life ticks over as normal, normality is increasingly expensive and unsustainable. What lies beneath, though, is a systemic and catastrophic dysfunction - where anyone even vaguely switched on recognises it as an existential national emergency.
I certainly didn't get the impression that Badenoch understands this. This was a speech for those Tory types who are well off enough to be insulated from the more immediate symptoms, who live in the places yet to be blighted by "diversity". People who think it's talking the country down to discuss the state of emergency we're in.
I was listening mainly to see if there were any signs that this party gets it, and for any sign of a policy agenda that recognises the scale of the tasks ahead. What we got, though, was dismal managerialism - the kind that would have made David Cameron proud. What I needed to hear was some kind of reassurance that they are as angry as I am about the state of the country.
I'm not going to list what ails this country. You know the list as well as I do. You also know what is at stake and how little time we have to prevent a cataclysm. I would expect a politician who understood this to be speaking in more sombre, serious tones, impressing upon the nation the urgency of our collective cause. But Badenoch could just as easily have been reading out her shopping list for all the passion she put into it.
But then I simply wouldn't expect anything different from someone who hasn't really lived here long enough to understand just how far we have fallen, or really experienced what we're in danger of losing forever. Badenoch is a hand-picked and groomed-for-politics citizen of nowhere, who can never be motivated to save a country she herself does not really know. The problem isn't that she's a Nigerian, per se. It's that she's not really one of us at all. If she were, she'd have a lot more to say that was worth hearing. She has only ever known Britain as a declining multicultural shit tip. She can never feel our profound sense of loss - or the anger that goes with it.