Political warriors target “right-wing governance”

Like her political hero Margaret Thatcher, Kemi Badenock divides opinion even within her own party.

Her unflinching views, “anti-woke” values ​​and no-nonsense style have made her a darling of the Conservative right and the party’s grassroots, many of whom see her as a star in the making.

Others noted that they believed her personality was combative and controversial.

The former business secretary’s analysis of the Conservatives’ fallout at the general election was that they “said the right things but governed to the left” and needed to “stop acting like Labour” to win back power.

It was a central promise of her Conservative leadership campaign, which focused on changing the fundamental mindset of British government.

Olukemi Adegoke was born in Wimbledon in 1980, one of three children of Nigerian parents. Her father is a general practitioner and her mother is a professor of physiology.

Badenock – who married banker Hamish Badenock in 2012 with whom she has three children – grew up in Lagos, Nigeria, and in the United States where her mother lectured.

As Nigeria’s political and economic situation worsened, she returned to the UK at 16 to live with a friend of her mother’s and studied for A-levels at a university in south London while working in McDonald’s restaurants and elsewhere.

After graduating with a degree in Computer Engineering from the University of Sussex, she worked in IT while also gaining a second degree in Law.

She then moved into finance, becoming a deputy director at private bank Coutts and later a non-editorial position as digital director of the influential Conservative-supporting magazine The Spectator.

It was at the University of Sussex that Badenock got a taste of right-wing politics and was “radicalized” by left-wing campus culture, according to Blue Ambition, a biography written by Conservative peer Lord Ashcroft. , going in the opposite direction.

She later described the student activists there as “spoiled, entitled, privileged people in training for the metropolitan elite”.

Badenock joined the Conservative Party in 2005 at the age of 25 and ran unsuccessfully for MP and London Assembly in 2010 and 2012 respectively.

She filled a vacant parliamentary seat in 2015 when two Conservative MPs, including Suella Braverman, were elected to parliament.

She supported Brexit in the 2016 referendum and a year later fulfilled her ambition to become an MP, contesting the Conservative seat of Saffron Walden in Essex.

Badenock spent three years bouncing around junior positions in government, and in 2022 she joined the rapid succession of ministerial departures that led to Boris Johnson’s ouster.

To the surprise of many colleagues, Badenock subsequently joined the huge race to succeed Johnson despite never having been in the cabinet.

The campaign started as a long shot, backed mainly by loyal friends who also entered parliament in 2017, but quickly gained momentum and was backed by heavyweights such as Michael Gove.

Badenock ultimately came in fourth with the support of 59 MPs, more than the support of 42 MPs, which was enough to put her on top of the parliamentary stage of this leadership election.

Her direct approach to instructing colleagues to “tell the truth” won Badenoch a larger role in the Conservative Party, and Liz Truss inevitably chose to appoint her to the cabinet, naming her international trade secretary.

Rishi Sunak retains her role and adds briefing on business, women and equality.

Her tenure in Parliament was characterized by her forthrightness and willingness to engage in controversial issues.

As junior equalities minister under Johnson, she angered many on the left when she challenged the idea that institutional racism was widespread in Britain.

In an interview with LBC, she said she had only experienced prejudice from left-wingers.

“I came to this country when I was 16 and now I’m running for prime minister – isn’t it amazing? I was born in this country, but I didn’t grow up here.

“I don’t understand why people want to ignore all the good things and just focus on the bad things and use the bad things to tell the story,” she added.

She calls herself a gender-critical feminist and has been an outspoken opponent of moves to allow transgender-identified people to self-identify.

As cabinet minister for women and equalities, she led the charge to stop the UK government from blocking Scotland’s gender recognition reform bill.

Responding to Cass’s report into NHS gender identity services, she said the services had been “hijacked by ideologues” and critics “gagged”, resulting in children being harmed.

She also opposes gender-neutral restrooms.

In 2021, members of the government’s own LGBT+ advisory group urged her to “consider her position” after she failed to issue a manifesto banning so-called conversion therapy.

Badenock is often labeled a “culture warrior,” a label she disputes.

She has sometimes been accused of wanting to start fights in empty rooms, but she says she doesn’t like fights but is prepared to fight to defend Conservative principles.

This is simultaneously what endears her to Conservative MPs and what makes some of them anxious.

In the early stages of the leadership election, several Conservative MPs told the BBC they were leaning towards backing Badenock but had been put off by her heated interactions during her time in government.

To her supporters, that’s the point: unlike other ministers, she’s willing to tell MPs what she believes in and be forthright about her views.

On the eve of this year’s party conference in Birmingham, she made headlines for claiming that not all cultures are “equally valid” and citing “a culture where women are told they shouldn’t work” as an example.

She also attracted attention in Birmingham for joking that 5-10% of civil servants were so poor they should go to jail. She has previously strongly denied bullying officers.

But after the interview, she regretted it seems to suggest Current maternity leave pay levels are “too high”. She claimed her comments had been “misrepresented” and said she had been talking about excessive business regulation and that maternity pay was “a good thing”.

In 2018, Badenock admitted that a decade earlier she had hacked into the website of Harriet Harman, the then leader of the House of Commons and deputy leader of the Labor Party, as a prank. Harman accepted her apology.

In a public row in February, she accused the Post Office chairman she sacked of seeking “revenge” by “making up” claims he was told to delay the payment of compensation to a deputy postmaster affected by the Horizon IT scandal .

Henry Staunton said he was told to suspend payments to allow the government to “tough out the election” in an apparent attempt to ease the public finances.

Badenock has also not shied away from public clashes with MPs in her own camp, including her rejection of calls to make discrimination against menopausal people illegal.

Appearing before a House of Commons committee, she told chairwoman Caroline Knox that “many people” wanted to use equality laws as “a tool to achieve different personal agendas and interests”.

During her leadership campaign, Badenock spoke of conservatism “in crisis” – under attack from new “progressive ideologies” involving “identity politics” (politics based on a particular identity such as race, religion or gender) , continued state intervention, and “the idea that bureaucrats make better decisions than individuals or elected politicians.”

Although the Conservatives have been in power for 14 years, she believes increased government regulation and public spending have undermined economic growth and polarized the country.

She rejected calls from Robert Jenrick for an immediate fix on key party policies, saying Britain’s “system is broken” and needs to be rebooted.

She added that the Conservative Party needs to return to its core values ​​and develop new policies that recognize this reality.