Badenoch poised to be kingmaker after gaining ground in third vote
Kemi Badenoch says her experience of ‘real poverty’ in Nigeria inspired her to became a Conservative
KEMI BADENOCH last night emerged as the potential kingmaker in the Tory leadership race as she picked up votes in the third ballot.
Rishi Sunak, the former chancellor, made the biggest gains among MPS and is now on the brink of making the final two, who will progress to a vote of party members.
But there was no surge in support for either of the candidates best poised to take the second slot, with Liz Truss failing to pick up as many backers as hoped and Penny Mordaunt losing a vote.
It means Mrs Badenoch, the former communities minister, and her supporters could play a critical role in who makes the last two. Backers of Ms Truss and Ms Mordaunt were last night courting those who voted for Mrs Badenoch, though she said she would stay in the race and was “in it to win”.
Michael Gove, the former communities secretary, said Mrs Badenoch – whom he is backing – could make the last two after MPS had “buyer’s remorse” for initially supporting other candidates. Four candidates are in the race to replace Boris Johnson as the next prime minister. Mr Sunak extended his lead by taking 115 votes from Tory MPS, up by 14. If he reaches 120 votes in the final round he is guaranteed to progress.
Ms Mordaunt, the trade minister, received 82 votes, down one from Thursday’s second-round ballot. The change reflects how she was perceived to have fared in the televised debates.
Ms Truss, the Foreign Secretary, was in third with 71 votes. That increase of seven votes meant she closed ground on Ms Mordaunt. But the limited increase raised doubts as to whether the 27 Tory MPS who had voted for Suella Braverman, the Attorney General, followed her call to back Ms Truss after she was knocked out of the contest.
Mrs Badenoch received 58 votes, up by nine. Only Mr Sunak gained more votes in the third round. However, she is most at risk of being knocked out in the next round of voting today.
Few pundits or Tory MPS predicted at the start of the contest that Mrs Badenoch, who became an MP in 2017 and has never been in the Cabinet, would make the last four.
The 42-year-old’s defence of free speech, firm stance on gender equality issues, fluency as a speaker and representation of a younger generation of Tories has chimed with MPS.
She tweeted after the result: “On to the next vote. Thank you to all my colleagues for their support. It’s all to play for. Continued momentum, closing the gap, I am the only change candidate left in the race. I’m in it to win.”
Sir Iain Duncan Smith, the former Tory leader who supports Ms Truss, last night urged Mrs Badenoch’s supporters to back his candidate.
“Now they have to make a decision about who they want to vote for,” he said of those who voted for Mrs Badenoch. He added: “I believe that Kemi’s team will come over to Liz.”
Mr Gove, speaking before the vote on LBC, said Mrs Badenoch had “star quality”, adding: “What we have seen in this race is that the more people see of Kemi, the more impressed they are.”
Tom Tugendhat, who was knocked out last night and whose endorsement will also be sought, said he would take his time: “I’m going to listen to what they have to say and I’ll be making my judgment later.”
THE 2017 Conservative Party conference went down in folklore for the most cursed leader’s speech of all time, as a prankster handed a P45 to a coughing Theresa May on a set that started falling apart behind her.
As a result, few people remember the inspirational moment that preceded it, as a newly elected MP, Kemi Badenoch, was chosen to introduce the then prime minister.
To wild applause from the audience in Manchester, she recalled being told by boys in Nigeria, where she grew up, that women could not be leaders, and would “shut them up” simply by saying Margaret Thatcher’s name.
She had come to Britain aged 16, she said, and had got to Parliament “because our party is the party of opportunity, inclusivity and hope”. The membership loved it.
Only four months earlier, Mrs Badenoch had become the MP for Saffron Walden in Essex, but Mrs May clearly saw the future of the party in the woman she chose to share her stage. Boris Johnson, applauding her with gusto from the front row, no doubt saw it, too, along with Michael Gove, who would become her most prominent backer in the current leadership contest. Whether or not
Mrs Badenoch one day makes her own leader’s speech, and follows Mrs Thatcher and Mrs May into Downing Street, there is little doubt she will play a big part in the future of the Conservative Party.
Supporters have long regarded her as Labour’s worst nightmare. Mrs Badenoch, 42, sees the Left as an obstacle to success for people from ethnic minorities – voters Labour likes to think it owns – rather than the solution, and speaks from experience.
She has described her shock at the low expectations Left-wing teachers had for their charges when she arrived in London. When she told a teacher she wanted to go to Oxford, she was told not to bother applying because “they don’t take people like you”. She said it was “typical of the mindset of the Left”, because the teacher lumped all black children together as a disadvantaged minority, rather than nurturing the potential of individuals.
She is anti-woke, supports stop and search, wants NHS reform, defends Britain’s record on race relations, praises the police and has said there were “good things” that happened under the British Empire, as well as bad ones. She loves Britain and is not afraid to say it.
She has been the fresh face of the leadership contest, despite being five months older than Rishi Sunak, and has given candid answers to questions, such as whether Mr Johnson is trustworthy (“sometimes”, she said).
Although she describes herself as effectively “a first generation immigrant”, Olukemi Olufunto Adegoke, as she was christened, was born in Wimbledon. Her mother had come here because she wanted to give birth in a private maternity hospital, and quickly returned to Lagos.
Mrs Badenoch’s father, Femi Adegoke, who died in January, was a GP and her mother Feyi was a lecturer in physiology (a job that also took the family to the US at one time), meaning the family were very much part of Nigeria’s upper middle class. Yemi Osinbajo, the Nigerian vice-president, is a first cousin once removed.
Nevertheless, she has said that “being middle class in Nigeria still meant having no running water or electricity, sometimes taking your own chair to school”, as well as a machete for protection.
When she was 16, with Nigeria under a military dictatorship and the universities closed, her father, whose savings had been all but wiped out in a currency crash, used what he had left to buy her a plane ticket to London.
He told her that her future was in her own hands, because “90 per cent of things that happen to you are down to you and only 10 per cent to other people”.
Staying with a family friend in Wimbledon, she went to a local sixth form college and worked in Mcdonald’s to pay her way, then cleaned loos to earn money when she was a computer systems engineering student at the University of Sussex.
Her first graduate job was as a software engineer at the IT firm Logica, which she combined with studying law part time at Birkbeck, University of London.
She later worked as a systems analyst at Royal Bank of Scotland Group and at Coutts, then ran digital operations for the Spectator magazine, which has been championing her cause of late.
She has admitted that in 2008 she used her IT skills to hack into the website of Labour’s Harriet Harman, for which she later apologised.
By the time she was 25 she had joined the Conservative Party, and it was at her local association that she met her husband, Hamish Badenoch, who stood unsuccessfully to be an MP in 2015 and now works for Deutsche Bank. The couple have three children, the youngest of whom is not yet three.
After her own failed attempt to enter Parliament in 2010, Mrs Badenoch was elected as a member of the London
Assembly in 2015, spanning the Boris Johnson and Sadiq Khan mayoralties before she won the safe parliamentary seat of Saffron Walden in 2017.
In a tub-thumping maiden speech in Parliament, Mrs Badenoch eloquently explained her political beliefs and where they had come from.
She said she had seen “real poverty” in Nigeria, and: “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.”
Brexit, she said, was “the greatest ever vote of confidence in the project of the United Kingdom”.
Mrs Badenoch has found allies in senior Tories who regard culture wars as an essential weapon in defeating Labour: she opposes self-identification of gender by trans people and at her campaign launch, hand-made signs saying “men” and “ladies” were taped to the doors of gender-neutral loos.
In a poll of Tory party members carried out on Saturday, after the first leadership debate, Mrs Badenoch came out top with 31 per cent.
There is every reason to expect to see a lot more of her in future.