Kemi Badenoch greets me at her constituency home, a 16th-century house down a single-track road in open north Essex farmland. Outside are wellies of many sizes; inside are exposed beams and an Aga, turned off because Kemi suspects they’ve run out of oil. Saffron Walden is a plum Tory seat, whose 25,000 majority is safe against even a Labour tsunami. It is also overwhelmingly rural, an irony that doesn’t escape Badenoch, who was told when seeking selection in a similar place, “You’re too urban,” code for we can’t imagine a black MP.
The secretary of state for business and trade has made time for the kind of personal interview she dislikes as rumours swirl she’s in a WhatsApp group called Evil Plotters, and is poised to topple the PM. She is, of course, opaque about her ambitions, diligently praising Rishi Sunak as a “stability” leader and referencing his five-point plan. “If I’m abroad making a trade deal, they say I’m on manoeuvres because I’m distancing myself from the government,” she says. “But if I’m here making a speech, somehow I’m on manoeuvres too.”
Yet whether before or after the election, there’s no question Badenoch, 44, who tops polls of Tory members and whose bookies’ odds have shrunk to 3-1, is a hot contender. She relates how, when she stood in 2022 (coming fourth), Nadine Dorries said, “Shouldn’t you be running for mayor of London instead?” Not only was this putting her back in the “urban” box, but it set a cap on her ambition, and Badenoch, who exudes ferocious and limitless self-belief, was livid. People marvel that she could become Conservative leader despite being a black woman raised in Nigeria. Yet such supposed disadvantages are in fact her superpowers.
It turns out I interviewed Kemi Badenoch, then Adegoke, back in 2010 when she was standing against Tessa Jowell in Dulwich. (She would come third.) It was a round table of six female Tory candidates, part of David Cameron’s drive to diversify his parliamentary party of 181 men and 17 women, and inevitably dubbed “Cameron Cuties”. I asked who would call herself a feminist and Kemi was one of only two who raised a hand. To the question, “What was the last issue that made you shout at the TV?” replies ranged from unaffordable childcare to NHS red tape. But Kemi, then 30, replied, “I hate identity politics.” Long before the phrase was common parlance, let alone dominated political discourse, Badenoch’s views were fully formed.
We settle in the living room to talk, Kemi making us tea which she drinks with evaporated milk and four sugars: “It’s a Nigerian thing.”
Badenoch grew up in Lagos, the eldest of three children. Her mother, Feyi, lectured in physiology at the university medical school; her father, Femi, who died in 2022, was a GP, and they lived above his clinic, which prospered with contracts to treat employees of Nigeria’s oil companies. But after three years the couple had not conceived “and people use the word ‘barren’ ”, says Badenoch. “You often get family members saying, ‘You need to take another wife.’ ”
So they had an obstetric referral to a Harley Street doctor, and in due course Olukemi Olufunto was born at the private Catholic maternity hospital St Teresa’s in Wimbledon (since demolished). The couple flew home after two weeks, returning for the birth of Kemi’s brother two years later, but their third child, her sister, was born in Nigeria.
Badenoch is keen to clarify her parents did not use the NHS as health tourists. “It’s really funny, because my mother couldn’t believe I had my children on the NHS: ‘Can’t you afford to go private?’ She thought I was being cheap.” Nor, she says, did they deliberately have their children here to entitle them to citizenship. “It’s very, very aggravating when people say my mother had me here to be an ‘anchor baby’,” she says. “She’s the most incorruptible woman.” Badenoch points out this was the late Seventies, when few Commonwealth citizens travelled, visas were not required and her parents only realised years later their first two children were British by birth.
While many Nigerian families are strict and patriarchal, hers was informal and warm. “Friends used to call us the Cosbys, because my dad was a doctor like in The Cosby Show, and we were very close. Nigerian parents can be very distant, but we would joke and laugh. We knew our parents and our parents knew us.”
With his clinic so close, her father was the more present parent, “the one who’d ask if we’d done our homework”, while her mother was at work. Badenoch credits her father with her sense of personal responsibility. “Whenever we said, ‘Oh, this happened and it wasn’t my fault,’ Dad would say, ‘Eighty per cent of what happens is down to you and only twenty per cent is down to the other person, and there’s nothing you can ever do about that.’ ”
Yet she attributes her political career to her mother. “She thinks I get it from my father. But she is a very forthright person. When she was retiring, I watched a video of her giving her speech and I thought, ‘That’s where I get it from.’ She’s a very good public speaker: she made lots of jokes, has very strong opinions and never changes her mind.”
In the Nineties, when the Nigerian economy crashed, her father lost his oil company contracts and their mother supported the family — “If she hadn’t had a job, we would probably have been destitute.” In her maiden speech as an MP, Badenoch spoke of “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”. She was a bright child, excelling at maths and English, who loved beating boys in her class at chess, at seven winning a national girls’ chess tournament. At 16, her US SAT scores won her a partial pre-med scholarship to Stanford, but her family still couldn’t afford the place.
The political situation worsened and in 1995 Nigeria was suspended from the Commonwealth when its military dictatorship executed environmental activists including writer Ken Saro-Wiwa. Badenoch’s parents then used Kemi’s British passport to get her out. She was sent to live with a family friend in Morden, south London, and enrolled for A-levels at a local college.
“It was very lonely,” she recalls. “But what got me over it was the novelty and excitement of being in the UK. There were so many things I hadn’t done before. I’d never been on a bus. And I thought London buses were so futuristic because the doors made a swish noise when you got on. It was like living in a movie.” She worked at McDonald’s to support herself, but also because she got to eat burgers every day, unimaginable in Nigeria. “I found the work quite fun. I probably did too much of it, which didn’t help with my A-level grades.”
This middle-class girl whose parents assumed she’d be a doctor now studied among working-class kids of whom little was expected. Her tutors “actively encouraged me not to apply for things that I wouldn’t get into”. She decided to study computer engineering at Sussex University, known for its radical left-wing politics. While she had 26 hours of lectures a week “and the rest of the time was spent working and mugging up for all the exams”, she’d meet humanities students with time on their hands.
“People often ask what made me a Conservative and there was no one thing. But part of it was being at Sussex among snotty, middle-class north Londoners who couldn’t get into Oxbridge. One of the things that drove me insane was how they talked about Africa. So high-minded: ‘We need to help Africans’; ‘Let’s boycott Nestlé, because they make African mothers give their babies powdered milk.’ Having parents who were doctors, I knew when women are malnourished, formula milk might be a better alternative, and mothers with Aids can’t breastfeed at all. These stupid lefty white kids didn’t know what they were talking about. And that instinctively made me think, ‘These are not my people.’ ” When students protested against tuition fees, Badenoch wrote a letter to the college newspaper saying, “There are overseas students here who pay tens of thousands of pounds in fees — and you’re complaining about £1,000.” It was published, she says, with the editor adding “a snarky reply”.
She couldn’t wait to get a job, and had already taught herself to design websites which paid better than McDonald’s. Working first as a software engineer, she moved into banking, becoming an associate director of the private bank Coutts, before a year at the Spectator magazine as digital director. At 25, she joined the Conservative Party.
Like Mrs Thatcher, whom she reveres, Badenoch dismisses the idea government can solve every problem. “I’ve never assumed the system will work it out,” she says. “I think the system doesn’t know or care and it’s our job to make it know and care.” While voters complain “nothing is working” and blame 14 years of Tory rule, Badenoch sees “a lot of bureaucratic indifference” within public bodies from the NHS to the Bank of England.
Those surprised to hear tough, small state views from a black woman — and Badenoch has been mistaken in parliament for a Labour MP — conflate Britain’s African diaspora with Caribbean immigrants. “Until recently, Africans came here from middle-class homes to go to university and, if we stayed around, we worked in banks,” she says. “Whereas the Windrush generation came to do working-class jobs: driving buses, nursing.”
The two groups also have a historically different relationship with British imperialism. “In Nigeria, there are more than 300 different languages,” says Badenoch, who spoke Yoruba before English, “and our history goes back thousands of years. And yes, there was a period of colonialism: some people came, they did some things and they left. But that is not our story. In the Caribbean, that is a profound part of their history, which creates a different mindset towards this country. And what is really sloppy and lazy is anyone assuming all black people have the same issues, the same experiences of discrimination. It is very, very complex.”
On race, Badenoch has been accused of telling white people what they want to hear. In 2021, she championed the Sewell report into ethnic disparities, which concluded — to the fury of many activists — that Britain is not institutionally racist. She has criticised Black Lives Matters for preaching “divisive” critical race theory, which argues “white privilege” is inevitable, and said last year that Britain “is the best country in the world to be black”. She loathes the acronym Bame, which lumps every person of colour from a Qatari to a Jamaican under the same banner. “We need to make sure people understand that the journey of immigration into the UK is a happy one,” she says. “People came here for a better life, and turning it into a story of how every child of immigrants is downtrodden is quite wrong and doesn’t foster social cohesion.”
Has she experienced racism in Britain? “Very rarely,” she says, and recalls canvassing her constituency before being elected when a woman asked why she didn’t stand in a black area. The local councillor accompanying her was mortified, “but I said, ‘Don’t worry about it. I can’t focus on that one person. I have to focus on the 999 who’ve said nice things.” But what will she tell her mixed race children — aged between four and ten — when they enter the wider world?
She quotes Remi Adekoya, a social scientist who found children raised in families where misfortunes were always blamed on racism tend to see discrimination everywhere. She recalls years ago being turned away from a Greek restaurant because a private party was about to start. Her boyfriend at the time assumed the manager didn’t want black diners. So they ate elsewhere and then Kemi insisted they return “and there was a party happening. But he wouldn’t have gone back. He’d just have assumed it was racism, because that’s what he’d been brought up to believe.” In banking she’d sometimes “manage black people who were simply in the wrong job. And if they were white, they’d just have left. But because they weren’t white, they said, ‘This organisation is racist.’ Which doesn’t mean,” she adds, “that discrimination or racism don’t exist.”
Does she worry how her son will be treated by police as a teenager? “It’s true if you’re black you’re more likely to be stopped. But you’re also more likely to be a victim of crime committed by people who look like you. It is very, very much about areas [of the country] rather than just what people look like. If police don’t police areas with problems, things would be a lot worse.”
What enrages her most is when mixed-race children such as her own are regarded solely as black. “This is the ‘one-drop rule’: white is the pure thing and any other ancestry takes you out of that category. Context is important: in Nigeria my children would be oyinbo, which means white. Yet here I see a lot of mixed-race people who seem embarrassed about the white side of their family. Kehinde Andrews has written a book called The Psychosis of Whiteness. This man is mixed race! I think if you’re mixed race, you should have the best of both worlds.”
The world her husband, Hamish Badenoch, inhabited couldn’t be more different to her own: Ampleforth head boy, Cambridge and now Deutsche Bank. They met on Kemi’s ill-fated Dulwich election campaign. “It wasn’t love at first sight,” she says. “I was already the candidate and he’d just moved into the area and, as it turned out, lived at the end of my road. It was amusing because the association members didn’t warm to this public school boy who turned up and had opinions. And I thought, ‘Oh, this guy thinks he should be doing my job.’ ”
But Hamish turned up for every canvass, helped fundraise, “and when I had tough times, he was always there. So we became friends.” Was he courting her through the medium of politics? “He says no, but getting up early on a Saturday morning to deliver leaflets isn’t normal, especially if you have a very busy social life.” Then they discovered that Hamish was also born at St Teresa’s. “So we had that connection — and it just grew from there.”
I ask how they’re different and Badenoch replies: “He thinks my capacity to tolerate conflict is too high. He says, ‘You’re the politician in the family and I’m the diplomat.’ But we actually share a lot: we both grew up in big, close families. So our values are the same.” They had 19 guests for Christmas, mainly Hamish’s siblings and their kids. His mother is very hands-on with her grandchildren, while they call Kemi’s mother, a decade younger, “the non-executive grandmother” as she’s declared she’s done with childcare.
Hamish Badenoch, 45, sounds the consummate political husband: as a former candidate and councillor, he understands the Tory machine, he’s supportive, discreet and, crucially, rich. (He tops up the MP’s allowance, so their rented constituency house is large enough for a playroom, which means their children enjoy coming for weekends.) Given Badenoch is constantly abroad making trade deals, he does the majority of childcare — “Although we spend a middle-class salary on nannies” — plus all the cooking, because she finds it a chore.
Her older daughter says she “hates” her mother’s job because it takes her away from her family. Badenoch talks wistfully about missing school assemblies or Nativities, tries to keep weekends for her family and any time to herself is spent vegging out on escapist adult cartoons on Netflix called Archer, Castlevania and Blood of Zeus. “Watching them, I don’t have to think.”
Badenoch notes that according to Nadine Dorries’ book The Plot, she is supposedly being manoeuvred by powerful men. “But if there’s somebody who is doing that, wouldn’t it be the person who goes to bed with me every night and pays for my home and so on? Hamish is a huge influence on how I do things. Which I think is right, because this job affects his life.”
Dorries and Badenoch clearly loathe each other. The former blames the latter for resigning as cabinet minister and abetting the downfall of Boris Johnson. Dorries also portrays Badenoch as a puppet of Michael Gove — “As if I have no thoughts and no opinions of my own,” fumes Kemi. It rankles that her best speeches are attributed to him. “Like they’re saying, ‘She’s not that bright. It’s some man who is doing this.’ ” Badenoch and the levelling-up minister were close friends and allies. Then, after Gove’s divorce, he had a relationship with a friend of the Badenochs whose marriage subsequently ended. “He did something that was very, very annoying,” says Kemi. Has it finished their friendship? “It’s not what it used to be, but he’s somebody I have to work with.”
Then she shows me a phone message from her Westminster office manager reporting a death threat to the police. These have intensified, she says, since The Plot. “She [Dorries] thinks she’s just writing stuff, but people who have that kind of mindset latch on to it. If you get the unhelpful coalition of mental health issues and propensity to violence, then you read the Nadine Dorries conspiracy theory and decide you want to kill someone, it’s very, very nasty.”
Badenoch’s leadership bid pivots on throwing red meat to the Tory right factions yet being intelligent and nuanced enough to reassure party moderates. An unabashed Brexiteer, she is busy scrapping 2,000 EU laws, and tells me the famous promise on the bus to put an extra £350 million into the NHS has come true. “In fact, we put in more — and what that has exposed is that the issues with the NHS aren’t around funding.” She doesn’t only believe the Rwanda deal will happen but that its critics are racist: “People need to move away from the mindset of Africa just being this horrible place. So, as a black woman, saying there are African countries that can also take refugees is very important in raising their status.”
But the policy area in which she has won respect across the political spectrum, including from left-wing feminists, is her handling of the gender debate. While Rishi Sunak makes crude culture war points such as, “A man is a man and a woman is a woman,” Badenoch has immersed herself in this arcane and contentious issue. She was drawn in because, “I feel being a woman is a much stronger part of my identity than being black or Nigerian. Because it is so real. Bringing a child into the world grounds you in the reality of being a woman. Puberty, menstruation, menopause. It is very biological. And I grew up in a place where people would exploit that.” She is scornful of “academic feminism with all its buzzwords… My feminism is about, ‘I am more vulnerable physically. People will try to exploit that and make me feel less of a person.’ And I will defend myself and anyone else in that position.”
Although trade and business amounts to two departments fused into one, she insisted on retaining the equalities brief to see through her hard-won changes. Initially, she had to fight her own department even to meet Keira Bell, a detransitioner who was taking the Tavistock gender identity clinic to the High Court for prescribing male hormones that had irreversible effects. She is highly critical of a minority of civil servants who don’t see their job as to enact government policy but pursue their own political agenda. “I saw that on the LGBT rights campaigning side as well. There were clearly some people who had come in to deliver a particular agenda. And Keira Bell was not part of that.”
Behind the scenes she has defended the besieged Equality and Human Rights Commission head Baroness Falkner, now cleared of bullying allegations, whom she calls a “phenomenal person”. And it was at Badenoch’s insistence that the government activated a section 35 order to block Scotland’s Gender Recognition Reform Bill, which would have introduced self-identification. When Scottish courts upheld this decision, “It was a relief, not a victory.”
On gender issues she’s had electrifying public clashes with Caroline Nokes, a fellow Tory and chairwoman of the women and equalities committee. Does she think Nokes is trying to undermine her? “I think there are some questions where it’s not really scrutinising policy. It’s about the person. And I’m on top of my brief. I will not be tripped up.”
She was, however, nearly drowned last year. Returning in April from a constituency event, she and her husband were in the family car. “I always used to think, ‘How do people die in flash floods?’ But the water came from nowhere. And there was just a slight dip in the road and suddenly, all the electrics went off. We got out of the car. The water was thick and strong and fast. We were wading, waist deep, and it was pitch-black. I had heels on! The car got written off.”
“You could have been…” I begin to say.
But Kemi Badenoch the arch-politician is ahead of me. “There could have been a by-election.”
This article was originally published in The Times