Many leading politicians are fond of talking about having been on a journey. But Kemi Badenoch’s journey has been longer and more eventful than most.
From the leafy London suburb of Wimbledon to Nigeria in West Africa and back to south London, and from the socialist hotbed of Sussex University to the rural idyll of Saffron Walden in Essex, she will hope her journey will ultimately take her to 10 Downing Street.
Along the way, this battling Boudica of the Conservative Party has earned a reputation for a combative and at times abrasive style of politics, aggressive even: someone who’d cross the road to have a fight.
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“I am somebody who is very blunt,” she admitted when challenged about this reputation by Sophy Ridge on Sky News this week.
“I’m very forthright and I’m very confident as well. I’m not a wallflower.”
Now that Conservative Party members have voted to elect either her or Robert Jenrick as leader, she’s the favourite, after strong performances in hustings and a TV debate which saw her recover from a gaffe-prone party conference.
In the three stages of the leadership contest, she has gained momentum at the right time. Mr Jenrick was the candidate with momentum in the early rounds of voting by MPs in September.
James Cleverly then had it after he stole the show at the conference “beauty contest”. But now, as party members cast their votes, the momentum appears to be with Ms Badenoch.
It did not look that way at the conference in Birmingham, when she clumsily declared maternity pay was “excessive” and said some civil servants were so bad 10% of them should be in prison.
Ironically, given her maternity pay gaffe, the mother-of-three has benefitted from a row over veteran Tory MP Sir Christopher Chope, a Jenrick backer, declaring: “You can’t spend all your time with your family at the same time being leader of the opposition.”
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Jenrick v Badenoch for Tory leadership
Wimbledon to Nigeria – and back again
Ms Badenoch’s background, however, is literally miles away – more than 3,000, in fact – from those of typical Conservative politicians. Her early years were spent in Nigeria, controversially described by David Cameron in 2016 as one of the most corrupt countries in the world.
Her Nigerian parents were comfortably middle class, “with a car and a driver”, she says. Father Femi was a GP with his own clinic, and her mother Feyi was an academic at the University of Lagos college of medicine.
But Kemi – full name Olukemi Olufunto Adegoke – was born in the private St Teresa’s Hospital in Wimbledon in January 1980 after her parents travelled to Britain and paid for private healthcare. It meant she had a British passport.
She then lived in Lagos until she was 16, when she returned to Wimbledon to take her A levels, in maths, biology and chemistry, living with her mother’s best friend “for a better future”, after arriving in the UK with just £100.
So she worked part-time in Wimbledon’s McDonald’s, cleaning toilets and “flipping burgers”, she says. Yet last month she was ridiculed by Labour MPs after saying: “I became working class when I was 16 working at McDonald’s.”
Next on her journey was Sussex University and a computer course. Here she had no time for the left-wing students she called “stupid lefty white kids” and later denounced Bob Geldof’s 2005 Live 8 charity concerts as patronising to Africans.
Working in banking, she joined the Conservative Party in that year, and though she was a massive Margaret Thatcher fan she became an early Cameroon.
She was on her way, becoming a member of the London Assembly and fighting Dulwich and West Norwood against Labour’s Tessa Jowell in the 2010 general election, coming third behind the Liberal Democrats.
Kemi Badenoch has spoken of her admiration for Mrs Thatcher. Pic: PA
Just like Mrs Thatcher nearly 60 years earlier, it was when she was a parliamentary candidate that Kemi met her husband, Cambridge-educated banker and party activist Hamish Badenoch.
He had been head boy at Ampleforth College, the catholic public school, a councillor in Merton, south London, and Conservative candidate in Foyle, in Northern Ireland, in the 2015 general election.
They were both born at the same hospital in Wimbledon, St Teresa’s, a year apart. After university Hamish worked in Malawi, Nigeria and Kenya before returning to London and Barclays, before his current job at Deutsche Bank.
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Entry into politics
But the noughties saw two potentially embarrassing blemishes on Ms Badenoch’s upwardly mobile CV. One was her widely reported hacking of Harriet Harman’s website, revealed shortly after she became MP for Saffron Walden in 2017.
These days, she regards the incident as relatively trivial. “It was a summary offence at the time, the same as a speeding ticket,” she told Sophy Ridge this week. “It was actually something quite different from what the law is now.
“And this was something that happened ten years before I was a member of parliament. It was very amusing at the time. Now that I’m an MP, it’s a lot less amusing.”
The other, described in Lord Ashcroft’s biography, Blue Ambition, was a near-fight with a member of the public at Oxford Town Hall in 2006 during a Conservative party event.
After an argument between the pair, the woman slapped Ms Badenoch and then ran off. Ms Badenoch then chased her up some stairs and grabbed her by the hair and pulled her back, before letting go and the woman ran out of the town hall.
“I never saw her again, thank goodness,” she said, recalling the incident years later.
Once in parliament with a safe seat, now called North West Essex, Brexiteer Badenoch’s ascent up the ministerial ladder was swift: party vice-chair, children and families, international trade, Treasury, equalities and local government, before joining Liz Truss’s cabinet and continuing under Rishi Sunak.
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‘I will swing back’
In the 2019 Tory leadership contest, she backed Michael Gove, widely viewed by MPs as her long-term mentor. Then in 2022, after quitting along with umpteen other ministers triggering Boris Johnson’s downfall, she stood herself, coming fourth. But she had put down a marker.
As a cabinet minister, covering business and equalities at the same time, she has lived up to her reputation as a blunt-speaking – critics would say rude – political scrapper, with some fiery clashes with opponents, some Tories and even Dr Who.
Her handling of the Post Office Horizon scandal was fiercely criticised after she controversially sacked Post Office chairman Henry Staunton when he claimed he was told to “stall” compensation payments – and then had a public row with him.
Courting controversy
One of her most high-profile spats was with former Doctor Who star David Tennant, after he said at the British LGBT awards: “Until we wake up and Kemi Badenoch doesn’t exist any more – I don’t wish ill of her, I just wish her to shut up.”
She hit back on X: “I will not shut up. A rich, lefty, white male celebrity so blinded by ideology he can’t see the optics of attacking the only black woman in government by calling publicly for my existence to end.”
In a sign of possible trouble ahead if she becomes Tory leader, she was reprimanded by Caroline Nokes, then chair of the equalities committee and now – ominously for Ms Badenoch – a Commons deputy speaker.
Kemi Badenoch appears to be the frontrunner to replace Rishi Sunak. Pic: Reuters
During a bad-tempered and shouty row at a hearing of Ms Nokes’ committee, Mr Badenoch accused the left-wing Labour MP Kate Osborne of lying in a row about trans issues.
But even more ominously if she does become leader, last year she infuriated Commons Speaker Sir Lindsay Hoyle by issuing a written statement on scrapping EU laws after Brexit rather than making a full Commons statement to MPs.
After she told the speaker she was sorry the timing of the announcement was “not to your satisfaction”, Sir Lindsay bellowed at her: “Who do you think you’re speaking to?”
It’s clashes like these on her long political journey that have led to claims that Kemi Badenoch could start a fight in an empty room.
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She is, after all, an aggressive, confrontational anti-woke crusader who takes no prisoners. And that’s just what her supporters say!
If she wins, Sir Keir Starmer beware.