BRILLIANT KEMI’S A STAR IN THE MAKING

LESS than two months have passed since she was elected as an MP for the first time, but already a star is born. I predict a brilliant future for Kemi Badenoch (pictured), the new Tory MP for Saffron Walden in Essex. I don’t want to jinx her Commons career, but it must be said that the 37-year-old delivered one of the most impressive maiden speeches heard in recent years. She told how she was brought up in Nigeria, where she did her homework ‘by candlelight because the state electricity board could not provide power’. She said she ‘fetched water a mile away in heavy, rusty buckets because the nationalised water could not get water to flow from the taps’. Mrs Badenoch showed a sense of humour, too, saying: ‘I am often inexplicably mistaken for a member of the Labour Party. I can’t think why.’ Her heroes are Winston Churchill, Margaret Thatcher and Airey Neave — the war hero-turned-Tory MP who was murdered by Irish Republican bombers in Westminster in 1979. She spoke of Britain, the country of her birth, as ‘a beacon, a shining light’, and said that ‘the vote for Brexit is the greatest-ever vote of confidence in the project of the United Kingdom’. Kemi Badenoch is quite something. She can set the Tory Party — and British politics — alight.