The darling of the Tory right trying to return them to power

Never afraid to ruffle feathers, Kemi Badenoch’s willingness to say what others might consider unspeakable has made her the darling of the Tory base.

Her outspoken views on issues from gender identity to institutional racism have enthused supporters on the right, while equally outraged critics on the left.

Over the course of her turbulent ministerial career, Ms Badenoch clashed with civil servants over her insistence that public buildings should have separate toilet facilities for men and women, and faced accusations of bullying her own civil servants.

Seen as the scourge of the ‘woke’, her direct, shoot-from-the-hip style offers some Conservatives the best antidote to the appeal of Nigel Farage’s Reform UK.

Others, however, fear that her confrontational approach – it is often said she could start a fight in an empty room – risks creating unnecessary controversy that distracts from the need to regain lost political ground to win.

Just at the party’s recent annual conference in Birmingham, she had to clarify off-the-cuff comments suggesting she believed maternity pay was too high and that “bad” civil servants should be in prison.

For her part, Ms Badenoch has denied deliberately seeking confrontation or taking part in so-called ‘culture wars’.

Likewise, she has never been one to back down when criticized.

When Doctor Who actor David Tennant told an LGBT+ awards ceremony that he would like to wake up to a world where she “doesn’t exist anymore” and that he wished she would “shut her mouth”, Ms Badenoch hit back and vowed that she would. don’t be silenced by a “rich, left-wing, white male celebrity” attacking “the only black woman in government.”

The row reflected her sometimes difficult relationship with elements of the LGBT+ community – she faced calls to resign as equalities minister when three government advisers on the issue resigned over the government’s failure to ban gay conversion therapy .

For some, it was a surprise to hear such robustly conservative positions coming from a black woman; when she first arrived at Westminster she was sometimes mistaken for a Labor MP.

However, Ms Badenoch has made it clear that her political vision is firmly rooted in her Nigerian heritage.

Her path to Conservative leadership was anything but conventional.

She was born in a private Catholic maternity hospital in Wimbledon and grew up in Nigeria, where her father was a general practitioner and her mother a physiology lecturer.

When the country’s economy collapsed in the 1990s, her parents took advantage of her British passport to get her out. They sent her at the age of 16 to live with a family friend in Morden, South London, to continue her education.

Ms Badenoch – who spoke Yoruba before she spoke English – later said she was “a first-generation immigrant in every sense”.

She enrolled at a local university to study A-levels and also worked part-time at McDonald’s to support herself.

Coming from a solidly middle-class background and assuming she would become a doctor, it came as a shock to find herself among working-class youth from whom little was expected.

Because her teachers tried to discourage her from applying for “things I wouldn’t get into”, she decided to study computer engineering at the University of Sussex.

The attitudes she encountered among left-wing students – “snotty, middle-class North Londoners who couldn’t get into Oxbridge” – helped drive her into Conservative politics.

She was particularly infuriated by the “supercilious” way in which they spoke of Africa, while understanding little of the reality of life on the continent.

“These stupid left-wing white kids didn’t know what they were talking about,” she told The Times. “And that made me instinctively think ‘these are not my people’.”

On leaving university, she initially worked as a software engineer before moving into banking as an associate director at Coutts, later becoming digital director at The Spectator magazine.

In 2005, aged 25, she joined the Conservative Party, counting Winston Churchill, Margaret Thatcher and (perhaps more surprisingly) Airey Neave – who was assassinated by the INLA in 1979 – among her political heroes.

She stood unsuccessfully for the Labor-held constituency of Dulwich and West Norwood at the 2005 general election, but was elected to Westminster in the safe Tory seat of Saffron Walden in 2017.

She was an ardent Brexiteer and made an immediate impression. She described the vote to leave the EU in her first speech as “the greatest vote of confidence ever seen in the project of the United Kingdom” and secured a place on the executive of the 1922 Tory backbench committee.

When Boris Johnson became Prime Minister in 2019, he gave Ms Badenoch her first government role as Secretary of State for Children and Families.

Promoted to equalities minister, she made headlines with her outspoken defense of the controversial Sewell Report, produced in the wake of the Black Lives Matter protests, which showed that Britain was not institutionally racist.

Her comments reflected a long-standing distrust of identity politics – she complained about the way her three mixed-race children and her banker husband Hamish Badenoch are considered exclusively black.

Her rise through the ministerial ranks under Mr Johnson did not stop her from joining the tide of resignations accelerated by the Chris Pincher scandal that eventually forced him out of Number 10 in 2022.

Despite her relative inexperience, Ms Badenoch entered the race to succeed him as Tory leader. She finished a creditable fourth place out of the eight candidates who made it onto the ballot, dramatically raising her profile in the process.

She was rewarded with promotion to cabinet by the winner, Liz Truss, who became her international trade secretary – a position she retained under Rishi Sunak, who also gave her the job on women and equality.

Although she was publicly loyal during his premiership, Badenoch is said to have attacked him after the Tories’ general election defeat, branding his decision to call a snap poll without consulting Cabinet as unconstitutional.

Launching her second leadership bid in two years, she argued that they had “talked the right but governed the left,” as she made her case for a smaller state in which the government did “fewer things” but did them with “brilliance.” .

Ms Badenoch sparked further controversy with a newspaper article in which she argued that “not all cultures are equally valid” in that immigrants to Britain should “share our values ​​and contribute to our society”.

It will now be up to the party members who have adored her for so long to decide whether she can now be the leader who can put them on the path back to power.