Sturgeon’s rapport

Nicola Sturgeon doesn’t feel much sisterly solidarity with the British Prime Minister. As Scottish First Minister, she has regular contact with Theresa May – and finds it an awful strain. “This is a woman who sits in meetings where it’s just the two of you and reads from a script,” she told Chris Deerin in the New Statesman. By contrast, “David Cameron, whose politics and mine are very far apart, always managed to have a personal rapport. You could sit with David and have a fairly frank discussion, agree the things you could agree on and accept you disagree on everything else, and have a bit of banter as well.” May is impossibly stiff and defensive, she says. For example, after the PM had been on a whirlwind foreign tour in January, the two women met for a catchup. “We sit down, it’s literally just the two of us, and I say, ‘You must be knackered.’ She said, ‘No! I’m fine!’ And it was as if I’d insulted her. It was just impossible to get any human connection.”

Kemi Badenoch has only been an MP for five months, but she is already being tipped for the top. It makes her rather uneasy. “It’s the kiss of death,” she told Frances Hardy in the Daily Mail. “It’s like asking the new recruit on their first day in a new company, ‘Do you want to be CEO?’ It’s very amusing and flattering, of course. But I’ve only just got my own office!” Her face is still new enough at Westminster that she is often – “inexplicably” – mistaken for a member of the Labour Party. Some on the Left, she says, find it impossible to imagine that a black woman could be a Tory. “They profess to be pro-woman and pro-ethnic minorities, but if you don’t sign up to their cause, they’ll hate you even more than they do privileged white males. It’s ‘How can you vote Tory after all we’ve done for you?’ It’s condescending and it’s an attitude that prevails among the privileged white Left.” Badenoch’s politics were shaped by growing up in Nigeria, where she witnessed the gradual collapse of the economy under a corrupt left-wing regime. When she was 16, her father scraped together his savings to send her to Britain for a better life. “I’m Conservative because of the experiences I’ve had,” she says. “I know what it’s like to live in a Third World country run by a regime with socialist principles. It shaped my outlook and helped me appreciate how great Britain is.”