This weekend Kemi Badenoch became the first black person to lead a UK party and the fourth woman to lead the Conservatives. But behind those labels – which she hates being identified with – who is she?
Born in Wimbledon, raised in Nigeria and trained in computer systems engineering, Badenoch was elected as a Conservative MP in 2017. She was given her first ministerial role by Boris Johnson in 2019, and in 2022 was promoted to cabinet by Liz Truss as the international trade secretary.
She has become known for her combative political approach and penchant for wading into culture-war issues. As the women and equalities minister she vociferously opposed self-ID for trans people. While she was the business and trade secretary she was accused of “bullying and traumatising” staff, which she has denied.
The Guardian spoke to five people with different perspectives on Badenoch.
A former Conservative minister who has worked with her:
“When she was at trade Kemi wasn’t really interested in huge areas of trade, because she regarded herself as the guiding mind over and above everything rather than being bothered with the detail. If you talk to her ex-ministers, quite a lot of them would say they’d go to meetings with her and it was obvious she hadn’t read the brief. That’s not a great precedent. You’ve got to show up – if when you do show up it’s to pick a fight, that doesn’t seem ideal. You can bore voters into voting for you like Keir Starmer and John Major did, you can charm them like Tony Blair – and to some extent Boris Johnson – did, but you can’t argue them into voting for you. So policy-wise and politically, she’s a very difficult choice to understand the party making. With what she said about maternity leave, she has damaged the political prospects of lots and lots of candidates up and down the country in the general election.”
A (non-Tory) friend who met her when she was at the London Assembly:
“She’s not part of any gang and that allows her to speak her mind without worrying too much about whether she’s going to lose support from this person or that person and that. For most people who are not in Westminster, that’s rather an attractive quality, because the sense you get is that there’s a person who’s speaking the truth as she sees it – which is a rare thing in politics. Of course, it means that she very easily loses friends, and she loses friends all the time. I don’t think it is true that she goes about looking for fights, but she is very sensitive to slights [and] her basic approach to life is: ‘I will give as good as I get, and if somebody comes after me they’d better not expect any mercy.’
“She’s very sensitive to the feeling that people will treat her differently and have different expectations of her because of her ethnicity, and fed up of people listening to her talk about being a Conservative and then trying to interpret what she’s saying purely through the lens of ‘isn’t it strange that a black person would be a Conservative?’ I suspect the thing she hates most of all is that this picture is being built of her that she’s a person who doesn’t think about things deeply. She also never says thank you – she thinks a lot of the common courtesies in politics, and all the ‘let’s have drinks, let’s go around the tea room’, aren’t really a courtesy at all but are tricks and hypocrisies that politicians use to kid people about things.”
A former Tory special adviser who worked for a different minister while Badenoch was in cabinet:
“Kemi Badenoch wasn’t loved in DBT [the Department for Business and Trade] – she didn’t want to be there, and they could tell. She cornered Rishi Sunak at the cabinet awayday after a machinery of government change because she didn’t want business added to her portfolio – it was more work and two whole bills. She wouldn’t take boxes home during recess and was often un-contactable on weekends. She would block write-rounds without grounds to do so other than she disagreed ideologically. She’s divisive, lazy and antagonistic. All that being said, so long as she can turn her ire on Starmer, and not sow more division within the ranks, she might be OK – as she is smart, at least.”
A fellow MP and friend:
“It’s going to be entertaining. She’s going to destroy Keir [Starmer] at the dispatch box – she doesn’t hold back. She just says what she feels – she’s often very sharp and very to the point, sometimes without necessarily being able to predict the backlash. That’s in direct contrast to Keir, who is so cautious about potential backlash that he doesn’t really say anything of substance, ever. We got to know each other when she was pregnant and had very small children, when she would come and lie down in the ladies’ room and got chatting. It’s so odd to read that she’s lazy – that is the exact opposite of the woman I know. She never stops working. I would message and ask her a question about something and she’s in a foreign country at ridiculous o’clock and she’ll reply. She really is a hard worker at all hours while juggling the children.”
A Tory MP who was among her first backers:
“What you see is very much what you get. She’s been under the spotlight from day one and hasn’t let her pressure get to her or changed who she is. She has done her job and she’s delivered on merit knowing people were watching and judging her. She doesn’t jump to change things even when she’s under pressure to do so – but when she does move, it’s substantive. When you’ve got [Vladimir] Putin thinking how to smash Ukraine in the next few years and you’ve got Xi [Jinping] thinking how to dominate in the next 20, I want somebody who thinks beyond the next news cycle.”
