Kamala Harris may not be much of an orator — but she’s one hell of an operator. Don’t be fooled by her ­legendary ineloquence: that cackling laugh and her faux-homely online cooking shows.

Harris has risen to the top of American ­politics through a rare combination of ruthlessness and cunning.

We saw this over the weekend. As Joe Biden and his team took the momentous decision to pull out of the 2024 presidential race, ­Harris and her husband Doug Emhoff — who’d both been so supportive of the ailing Commander-in-Chief in public — were hitting the phones to drum up support among Democrat mega-donors for her bid to replace the sitting President at the top of the ticket.

When Biden finally announced on Sunday evening that he was withdrawing, the party swiftly fell in line behind Harris as the presumptive replacement.

That was partly thanks to bigwigs — the Clintons, veteran Congresswoman Nancy Pelosi and others — orchestrating matters. Yet the seamlessness of Harris’s takeover has also been down to her mastery of the party machine. Not only did she attract $230million (£180million) of funding in 24 hours, she won the backing of more than the 1,976 delegates needed to capture the nomination in the first round of voting. You might call it ­Kamala’s Koup.

So who exactly is Harris, who may well become the first woman to win the White House?

She has always had — to use the famous civil rights movement phrase — her eyes on the prize. Her great goal is not social justice, however, but the White House.

As an attractive and ambitious lawyer in her late 20s, she broke into politics by striking up a romantic relationship with ‘Slick Willie’ Brown, a married womaniser 31 years her senior, who also happened to be one of the biggest movers-and-shakers in West Coast Democratic politics.

The pair began dating when ­Willie was running to be mayor of San Francisco.

He was notorious for his love of Jaguar sports cars, flash designer suits and for being named one of the ‘world’s ten sexiest men’ by Playgirl magazine.

‘The measure of his flamboyance is he’ll go to a party with his wife on one arm and his girlfriend on the other,’ People Magazine reported in 1996.

Harris bitterly resents the ‘sexist’ accusation that she used Brown to get ahead.

Under his mentorship, however, she was appointed to two roles in California state governance that paid her some $400,000 over five years in 1990s money.

He gave her a BMW, too.

After Brown won the mayoral election, Harris was photographed kissing him as she placed a cap on his head with gold letters on the front that read: ‘Da Mayor.’

‘[Harris] may have him for the moment,’ remarked her lover’s wife, Blanche Brown, bitterly. ‘But come inauguration day — I’ll be the bitch holding the Bible.’

Sure enough, Harris promptly dumped her ageing lover after concluding there was ‘no permanency in our relationship’ and, when Willie was sworn in, Blanche stood beside him, Bible in hand.

Yet ‘Da Mayor’ continued to guide Harris as she ascended the greasy pole of San Francisco’s legal system. As she was sworn in as San Francisco’s first black ­District Attorney, Lift Every Voice And Sing — the so-called ‘Black National Anthem’ — was performed.

Harris is fiercely proud of her heritage. Her father Donald, 85, from Jamaica, was a professor of economics at Stanford University, and her mother Shyamala, who died in 2009, was an India-born biologist. To this day, Harris takes umbrage at people mispronouncing her first name, which is derived from the Sanskrit for ‘Lotus flower’.

In 2016, she released a patronising campaign video featuring children earnestly explaining that it’s not ‘Ca-mel-UH’ or ‘Ku-MAHL-ah’ but ‘Karma-la’. This is even more of a minefield for people on this side of the Atlantic because Harris once said the beginning of her name should be pronounced ‘like the punctuation mark’ which Americans pronounce as ‘karma’ not ‘comma’.

She has long been a celebrity darling: In 2005, Oprah Winfrey, no less, called Harris a ‘superstar’. But California’s residents, especially the families of the many poor black people she prosecuted as DA, remember her less fondly. ‘Cop Kamala’ fined and imprisoned the parents of children who played truant at school, including one youngster who suffered from sickle cell anaemia.

As DA, and later as California’s Attorney General, she also tried to win over conservatives by waging a brutal war on drugs. Her policies put large numbers of black people behind bars for even the most minor offences. Today, however, she campaigns for the full decriminalisation of cannabis. ‘Nobody should have to go to jail for smoking weed,’ she declared earlier this year.

Harris’s career has been defined by this willingness to tack Right or Left, depending on the way the political wind was blowing. In the 2000s, she often boasted about her ‘90 per cent conviction record’ — but she also let many violent criminals go free.

In 2004, she controversially declined to pursue the death penalty against the killer of a San Francisco police officer. Later, however, as Attorney General, she voted against banning capital punishment. Harris once also opposed a move to decriminalise prostitution in California — but then, as a presidential candidate in 2019, she declared that she favoured legalising sex work.

When it comes to embracing fashionable causes that mysteriously help her career, Harris is a dark-arts specialist.

In the 2010s, even though she had once accepted a $2,500 donation from disgraced Hollywood sex predator Harvey Weinstein, she hopped on the MeToo bandwagon.

She did this, no doubt, because she was motivated by a sense of injustice. But the global campaign also meant she could join the chorus of senior Democratic women calling for the resignation of Senator Al Franken, a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, who was accused of sexual harassment by eight women.

When Franken did resign in January 2017, Harris swiftly took his place on the Senate Judiciary Committee, which did her profile no harm at all.

In the summer of 2020, Harris, by then Joe Biden’s vice-presidential nominee, leapt on another woke cause: the Black Lives Matter movement, which sprang up following the death of George Floyd under a policeman’s knee in Minneapolis. As riots tore across America’s cities, she took to social media to post a link to a ‘bail fund’ for protesters who had been arrested — a jaw-dropping move for a woman who had spent years locking up criminals.

Yet even her greatest fans acknowledge that consistency has never been her forte. ‘My mother used to laugh when she told the story about a time I was fussing as a toddler,’ she once said.

‘She leaned down to me and asked: “Kamala, what’s wrong? What do you want?” And I wailed back: “Fweedom.” ’

She promptly stopped repeating that adorable anecdote after journalists revealed that Dr Martin Luther King had told an uncomfortably similar tale in 1965.

Today, polls suggest that Harris is the least popular vice-president in history. That’s partly down to her record. In 2021, President Biden put her in charge of handling America’s migrant crisis, yet she soon faced criticism for pointedly refusing to visit the porous southern US border.

She travelled to Guatemala instead for a glorified photoshoot in which, as ‘Veep’, she handed out cookies with her own face on them to the Press.

When challenged about her inability to stem the flow of migrants, she insisted: ‘We’re going to the border. We’ve been to the border. This whole thing about the border, we’ve been to the border. We’ve been to the border.’

‘You haven’t been to the border,’ the interviewer interjected.

‘And I haven’t been to Europe,’ replied Harris, giggling.

‘I don’t understand the point that you’re making.’

Her many ‘word salad’ speeches have become the subject of endless mockery.

From bafflingly describing AI as a ‘kind of a fancy thing’ that is ‘first of all two letters’, to a recent blunder when she called the 2024 election ‘the most election of our lifetime [sic]’, her oratorical skills have long been in question.

She also confused North and South Korea, mistakenly claimed that 220 million Americans had died of Covid-19 (the correct figures is 1.2 million) and joked that people aged between 18 and 24 are ‘really stupid’. Her most memorable gaffes have inevitably become memes, which generate millions of views. In May, 2023, she trotted out the now infamous ‘coconut tree’ anecdote at the White House: ‘My mother used to say to us: “I don’t know what’s wrong with you young people. You think you just fell out of a coconut tree?” ’ She then broke into loud guffaws before adding gnomically: ‘You exist in the context of all in which you live and what came before you.’

As Tucker Carlson, the Right-wing broadcaster, once put it: ‘In a functioning meritocracy, Kamala Harris would be a C-list massage therapist working out of a strip mall. Yet somehow she became our vice-president.’

Harris would no doubt call that sexism. Yet even many Democrats find that her personality grates. The First Lady Jill Biden has reportedly loathed her ever since Harris attacked her husband on a debate stage in 2019.

Jill allegedly opposed Biden’s decision to make Harris his vice-president and the rumours in Washington now suggest that one of the reasons Biden took so long to withdraw from the race is that his wife objected to the idea of Harris as Commander-in-Chief.

Others claim that Harris wears the trousers to an extraordinary degree in her own marriage: husband Doug is often dismissed as a ‘wife guy’, meaning a beta male who does what he’s told.

The 59-year-old entertainment lawyer told a newspaper in 2022: ‘Lifting women up so that they can carry out important roles is a very manly thing.’

This week, he was at a spin class in Los Angeles when Biden announced his decision to pull out of the race. Nobody had thought to tell the ‘Second Gentleman’ the news — least of all his wife.

Perhaps he was merely keeping his distance: among her staff, ­Harris has a reputation for being difficult to work with.

As vice-president, streams of employees have quit her team amid accusations of bullying and ‘an abusive’ office environment.

There have been reports of interns reduced to tears as Harris berated them. Some of her aides reportedly used the word ‘s**tshow’ when describing the atmosphere under her leadership.

Harris often suggests that this is all down to racism or misogyny. But the public find her annoying for other reasons.

She often uses irritatingly babyish language to discuss matters of state. ‘Ukraine is a country in Europe,’ she said in 2022. ‘It exists next to another country called Russia. Russia is a bigger country. Russia is a powerful country. Russia decided to invade a smaller country called Ukraine. So basically that’s wrong.’

None of the above will stop the barrage of gushing profiles of ‘Momala’ as she prepares to be elected the Democratic nominee next month.

In just over 100 days, she could be the most powerful person in the world. If so, many Americans will be left wondering if their nation has become the opposite of a meritocracy.

• Freddy Gray is deputy ­editor of The Spectator.