Kemi Badenoch was supposed to make the Tories serious again. She has failed | Rafael Behr

By jumping on Elon Musk's passing bandwagon and echoing the far right, the Conservative leader has shown she doesn't understand her responsibilities

The House of Commons is built for confrontation, with rows of benches facing each other across an aisle. When the original Victorian chamber was blitzed to ashes during the second world war, Winston Churchill was adamant that the antagonistic geometry be preserved in the restoration. He spoke dismissively of the foreign, semi-circular assembly, which enables every individual or every group to move round the centre, adopting various shades of pink according as the weather changes."

Churchill was leading a national unity government, but that was a wartime expedient. Normal democratic hostilities resumed as soon as Germany surrendered. MPs might rebel against their whips, or even defect, but it takes a national calamity or international crisis for Labour and Tory leaders to declare themselves on the same side.

Rafael Behr is a Guardian columnist