Kemi Badenoch showed how to deal with ‘pro-Palestine’ hecklers

Within roughly 48 hours, Kemi Badenoch’s video on X had amassed more than 1.8million views.

Badenoch was speaking at a press conference in Billericay, Essex. As she addressed the recent stabbing of two Jewish men in Golders Green and the UK’s anti-Semitism crisis, she was heckled and interjected by a pro-Palestine protester. The protester said Badenoch was ‘anti-Muslim’, and accused the Conservative Party leader of ‘pandering to the far right’. But Badenoch didn’t soften or pivot. She said what she came to say – that the threat faced by British Jews was unique and extreme – and kept saying it until the heckler ran out of steam.

The video went viral because people recognised something: a politician who meant it.

But I keep thinking about the heckler. Not harshly. What I keep thinking about is the instinct she represented. That urge to change the subject. To say, yes, Jews are being attacked, but what about this instead?

I know where that instinct leads. Because I’ve been there.

It was 4 August 2024. Sparked by the murder of three young girls in Southport at the hands of Axel Rudakubana, rioting had broken out across the country and in Middlesbrough (where I had been mayor until the previous year). In the days beforehand, I’d been on social media taking serious abuse – from people on my own side of politics – warning the public to stay away from the planned ‘march’ against immigration. I was saying plainly what most centre-right figures shrank from: that it wasn’t a march, it was a riot looking for a location. I lost some supporters, but I’d say the same thing again.

On the day of the planned march, I stood outside a mosque with about 80 Muslim men, many of whom I knew from my time as mayor. We were there to defend it if trouble came that way. For a couple of hours, the mood was calm and community-minded. A broadcaster called me for a live interview and I told them what I could see: a quiet, discreet gathering, there to protect rather than confront. Then the mood shifted.

A small group arrived. Dirty looks first, then muttering. Then a man was in my face telling me I wasn’t wanted. Within seconds others joined him, calling me a ‘Zionist’ and ‘baby killer’. The group started shouting ‘Allahu Akbar’. I’m a Catholic who had turned up to protect their mosque.

I left. I think if I’d stayed, violence would have come my way.

That group’s hatred of Israel, of Jews, of anyone they’d decided was a sympathiser, was intense and dangerous. It was loud, physical, and looking for trouble.

That is the element Badenoch was naming at her press conference in Billericay. Not Islam. Not the Muslim community. But an element whose loathing runs so deep that an act of solidarity becomes, in their eyes, an act of aggression. And that element is not as small as we need it to be.

Meanwhile, Britain’s Jewish community is just 270,000 people. Right now, they are under siege. Jewish schools and synagogues require the protection of security guards. Ambulances serving the Jewish community are firebombed and Jewish men are stabbed in Jewish neighbourhoods.

This is not background noise. This is not a policy debate. This is happening now, on our streets, to our neighbours.

Kemi Badenoch got called a racist, and kept going. She didn’t change the subject. She didn’t look away. Neither should we.

Andy Preston was mayor of Middlesbrough from 2019 until 2023.