The woman who now leads the Conservative party was born in London, but growing up in west Africa shaped the politician she would become
Kemi Badenoch’s election as leader of the Conservative party is a strikingly historic political and personal achievement. “To all intents and purposes, I am a first-generation immigrant,” she told the Commons in her 2017 maiden speech.
She was born British, as Olukemi Olufunto Adegoke, in a Wimbledon hospital in December 1980, before her parents took her home to Nigeria. Badenoch was among the last to benefit from the birthright citizenship rules which her heroine, Margaret Thatcher, would soon abolish in the 1981 British Nationality Act. She has compared her British passport to the golden ticket that let Charlie Bucket into Willy Wonka’s chocolate factory.
Badenoch’s migration journey has shaped her worldview. She flew back as a 16-year-old to the Britain of 1996 – a country where no black or Asian citizen had ever been a government minister. She has said that being “a very angry young person” got her involved in politics, pushed rightwards by feeling patronised by careers advisers and development campaigners who did not value African voices.
Badenoch says that she wants skin colour to be no more relevant than hair colour – yet the identity politics of Kemi Badenoch often sound much more colour conscious than that.
