Kemi Badenoch: The anti-woke Brexiteer making waves in the Tory leadership race
The Saffron Walden MP thinks, says and does the kind of things that today’s Conservative Party adores – but she has a divisive edge to her personality, writes Sean O’Grady
It may not seem very likely this time round, because she is probably a little too far behind in the MPs’ ballot, but there is every chance that Olukemi Olufunto Badenoch, known as Kemi, will end up in No 10 Downing Street. At 42, she has time on her side, and she has a level of talent and lashings of ambition, as she herself admits.
She enjoys the generous support and mentorship of Michael Gove, who was her ministerial boss before the last few weeks’ convulsions, which have seen her resignation and his sacking from the levelling up department. “She is brave, principled, brilliant and kind,” says Gove, adding that she has led the charge against “mumbo jumbo peddled by left-wing culture warriors” (which is a bit of mumbo jumbo itself, but we’ll let that slide). Having such a Svengali figure as Gove on her side could turn out to be a mixed blessing – one wonders what’s in it for him – but for now he’s her most high-profile backer and adviser.
Badenoch’s unexpectedly strong performance in the early stages of the contest – she far outstripped cabinet and former cabinet ministers Sajid Javid, Nadhim Zahawi, Jeremy Hunt and Suella Braverman – almost certainly guarantees her a middle-ranking post in cabinet, at least, and a potential springboard to the top job one day. She’s already served as a minister for children, equalities and housing, as well as at the Treasury, so she’s had wide experience – especially for someone who only came into the Commons, for the safe seat of Saffron Walden, in 2017, so actually post-referendum.
That is in part a consequence of the instability of the government in the past few years, and partly a willingness by party managers to promote her. She probably just missed a cabinet job at the last normal reshuffle.
How to account for the rise of Kemi Badenoch? First off, she thinks, says and does the kind of things that today’s Conservative Party adores. She’s a Brexiteer, which seems to be the mark of a true believer these days, and, in her maiden speech in parliament, in a debate on Brexit, described the result of the 2016 EU referendum as “the greatest ever vote of confidence in the project of the United Kingdom”.
Whether or not it is influenced by Gove and the Boris Johnson-Gove psychodrama, she is also now an outspoken critic of the way Johnson ran his government – not just the abuses of power and the incompetence, but the policies as well, not to mention the marked tendency to promise, unconditionally, all things to all people, and to throw money at any problem that crossed the prime minister’s desk. Although, when asked during the televised debate between candidates on Channel 4 whether the current prime minister was honest, Badenoch mustered “Sometimes.”
Johnson used to joke that his attitude to cake was to be in favour of it and the eating of it – cakeism. Badenoch has no time for this, or what she obviously sees as the cave-ins to the likes of Marcus Rashford’s school dinners campaign. In the refreshingly lively opening speech of her campaign, her renunciation of Johnson couldn’t have been clearer, or braver, given how unfathomably devoted many of her party colleagues still are to the outgoing prime minister.
She said: “For too long, politicians have been telling us that we can have it all: have your cake and eat it. And I’m here to tell you that is not true ... We have been in the grip of an underlying economic, social, cultural and intellectual malaise. The right has lost its confidence, and courage. Our ability to defend the free market as the fairest way of helping people prosper has been undermined. It has been undermined by a willingness to embrace protectionism for special interests. It’s been undermined by retreating in the face of the ‘Ben and Jerry’s’ tendency – those who say a business’s main priority is social justice, not productivity and profit – and it’s been undermined by the actions of crony capitalists.”
She continued: “The truth that limited government – doing less, but better – is the best way to restore faith in government has been forgotten, as we’ve pandered to pressure groups and caved in to every campaigner with a moving message. And that has made the government agenda into a shopping list of disconnected, unworkable and unsustainable policies.”
Ouch, Kemi. Very ouch. She has also proclaimed that Johnson “was a symptom of the problems we face, not the cause of them”, which is possibly even worse, suggesting that he’d didn’t even know what he was doing. Possibly for that reason, Liz Truss seems to be the PM’s preferred successor.
Where she does agree with Johnson, though, is in the rejection of “woke” – and in her explicit rejection, as a rather different kind of minister for equalities, of what she terms “critical race theory”. Her position on this was bolstered by a widely derided government-approved report last year by the Commission on Race and Ethnic Disparities, which stated: “Put simply, we no longer see a Britain where the system is deliberately rigged against ethnic minorities. The impediments and disparities do exist, they are varied, and ironically very few of them are directly to do with racism. Too often, ‘racism’ is the catch-all explanation, and can be simply implicitly accepted rather than explicitly examined.”
Such vestigial inequalities that couldn’t be dismissed through social-economic analysis were put down to “family”, which only served to pose more questions. To its critics, the report was an exercise in gaslighting, and the gaslighter-in-chief was Badenoch. Kemi herself said there had been “wilful misrepresentation” of the findings of the report.
But none of that bothers her, and it has made her remarkably popular on the harder, more Brexity end of the party. To them she is the “anti-woke” candidate, but brighter and less erratic than her rival Suella Braverman. She is also the anti-Mordaunt candidate, because, rightly or wrongly, Mordaunt’s patient and compassionate approach to trans rights issues has been caricatured so badly. This was clear on the stage of the TV debate on Friday, when Badenoch and Mordaunt clashed over the issue.
It is a strange world where such things become political totems, and where people such as Mordaunt and Rishi Sunak can now be described by some as being on “the left of the Conservative Party” and pro-European, where once they and their Leave sympathies would have made most on the right blush.
Badenoch also has that same dismissive attitude to constitutional conventions and independent agencies that got Johnson into such a mess. Indeed, there is another side to the Badenoch personality that seems to have been under-reported. For example, she got involved in a nasty and unnecessary public argument with the journalist Nadine White, now with The Independent but at the time with HuffPost.
White sent Badenoch some straightforward questions about an allegation that she, Badenoch, had declined to take part in a video. White explained at the time: “I approached the minister’s office asking for comment on my understanding that she had refused to participate in a video featuring Black cross-party politicians seeking to encourage the take-up of Covid-19 vaccinations. Far from being ‘fabricated’, as she alleged, this information was shared with me by multiple senior political figures.
“For her to log into Twitter and suggest that I had made the story up is an incredibly damaging allegation that goes to the heart of my professional integrity – while absolving her of her responsibility to be answerable to the very taxpayers who pay that internet bill. The minister suggested that I was ‘creepy and bizarre’ for putting my source’s claims to her. I am not. What I am is a young Black journalist simply doing my job. I have faced obstacles common to all aspiring reporters, as well as ones faced disproportionately by women and women of colour.”
Badenoch was then defended by a weak statement from a No 10 spokesperson: “She [Badenoch] felt that questions about why she wasn’t in the video were not right when she was not in the video because she was taking part in a trial. This is a case of a misunderstanding between the two parties.”
This exchange suggests that Badenoch might not be quite as cool and level-headed as she appears on stage, where her easy manner has impressed observers.
Badenoch has also broken the law, by her own admission. This concerns another under-reported story: the strange episode in which Badenoch decided it would be a good idea to hack Harriet Harman’s website. As she never tires of reminding an audience, Badenoch is a systems engineer who understands the new technologies, and she once found an unusual and unlawful way to demonstrate that.
In 2008, when Badenoch was just starting out as a politician (she contested her first seat, unsuccessfully, in 2010), she broke into Harman’s personal website by correctly guessing the username and password, these being “Harriet” and “Harman” respectively. (Harman would have been better off using the nickname Private Eye gave her for her championing of feminist causes: “Harperson”). The future wannabe PM then stuffed Harman’s site with pro-Tory messages, announcing her defection to the Conservatives and urging Londoners to back Johnson for mayor of London, which at least shows some perspicacity on Badenoch’s part.
Approached by The Mail on Sunday in 2018, Badenoch fessed up about an earlier admission on video of the “naughtiest” thing she had ever done, which was rather less innocent than Theresa May’s later confession to having run through wheat fields as a youngster. Badenoch said: “About 10 years ago, I hacked into a Labour MP’s website and I changed stuff in there to say nice things about Tories ... This was a foolish prank over a decade ago, for which I apologise.” Harman later tweeted: “@KemiBadenoch has written to me apologising. I have accepted her apology.”
Fair enough, but also a clear breach of the Computer Misuse Act 1990. More to the point, the episodes mentioned are suggestive of a personality not well suited to the highest elected office in the land.
Her impressive backstory is the kind of aspirational tale modern Conservatives love to hear, even if it doesn’t negate her errors of judgement. If successful, she will, for example, be the first prime minister to have worked for McDonald’s, flipping burgers and cleaning the loos, which she did to help pay her way through college. As she has reflected: “You would have people from college who would turn up and laugh at me, because I was there with my hat and my badge and I didn’t have any stars. But it was what I had to do. I didn’t have any money. My parents weren’t here, and I was living with family friends. So I had a roof over my head, but I needed to earn to live. There’s a dignity that you just get from working and earning your own money.”
In her maiden speech to the Commons only five years ago, she described herself growing up as a “young African girl” and now being a “British woman”, and how her life experience had made her a natural Conservative:
“I am often inexplicably confused with a member of the Labour party – I cannot think why. I am a Conservative. To all intents and purposes, I am a first-generation immigrant. I was born in Wimbledon, but I grew up in Nigeria. I chose to make the United Kingdom my home. Growing up in Nigeria I saw real poverty – I experienced it, including living without electricity and doing my homework by candlelight, because the state electricity board could not provide power, and fetching water in heavy, rusty buckets from a borehole a mile away, because the nationalised water company could not get water out of the taps.
“Unlike many colleagues born since 1980, I was unlucky enough to live under socialist policies. It is not something I would wish on anyone, and it is just one of the reasons why I am a Conservative. I believe that the state should provide social security, but it must also provide a means for people to lift themselves out of poverty.”
Badenoch was born in Wimbledon in 1980. Her father, Femi, was working as a GP, and her mother as a professor of physiology. She also lived in America for a time, and came to the UK as a 16-year-old to live with a friend of her mother. She went to university (Sussex and on to Birkbeck, London), and then worked in IT for Logica and Coutts Bank, among others. She met her husband, Hamish Badenoch, through Conservative politics, and they married in 2012. They have three children, and Hamish works for Deutsche Bank as “global head, future of work and real estate transformation”. She describes herself as a “cultural Christian”.
It is not quite 10 years since Badenoch became a politician, as a member of the London Assembly, and she has undoubtedly enjoyed a meteoric rise. But that doesn’t mean she’s ideally suited to be prime minister, nor that if she did she’d be a huge success. She does have a quite hard, if not harsh, side to her personality, which means she often disdains her critics and appears unsympathetic to those less fortunate than she is today.
For example, she herself concedes that her “greatest weakness” is that her sense of humour sometimes makes her seem “flippant about issues”, though perhaps it betrays a more fundamental flaw. She has ridiculed the Online Safety Bill as a foolish attempt to “legislate for hurt feelings”, and the voters should fear someone who hints at scrapping large but unspecified parts of the welfare state to fund tax cuts: “We need to be straight with people. The idea we can simply say ‘efficiency savings’, click our heels 20 times and they’ll materialise is for the birds. It’s the scale and structure of government that drives the inefficiencies.”
So there is a flinty, divisive edge to Badenoch of a kind that we last saw when Thatcher was busily rolling back the frontiers of the state and impoverishing millions in the process. It is as if, while Badenoch was endowed with brains, confidence, ambition and a certain defiant bravery, compassion was not so high on the list.