Let me be clear: expecting the leader of the Conservative Party to personally review a video before it weaponizes a historic massacre is simply bad management. Badenoch was entirely correct to throw her Gen Z social media team under the bus.
Over a rather dry pheasant at the Carlton Club last week, I was just saying how difficult it is to find good help these days. Now, Kemi Badenoch is being pilloried by the press simply because a few very young people on her team accidentally used footage of British soldiers opening fire on unarmed civil rights marchers in Derry to score a point against Labour’s Northern Ireland legacy proposals. The progressive outrage is exhausting. A busy party leader cannot be expected to sit around identifying every instance of state-sponsored slaughter that inadvertently makes it onto her timeline.
We must remember that today's youth simply lack the historical literacy to distinguish between defending the honorable service of our veterans and posting a highlights reel of a 1972 massacre. If anything, this reveals a failure of the national curriculum, not the Conservative leader who merely provided the platform, the budget, and the directive to attack the opposition's legacy bill.
We specifically asked the interns for upbeat, patriotic content of troops looking assertive, and frankly, it is Labour's fault for making the Troubles so visually confusing for our summer intake.
The true tragedy here is that Badenoch has been forced to spend her weekend apologizing for the inevitable consequences of delegating inflammatory rhetoric to cheap labor. If we demand that our politicians actually take responsibility for the propaganda published under their own names, I fear we will permanently damage the robust, entirely unaccountable political discourse that makes this country great.