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World News See other World News Articles Title: England’s New Conservative Superstar Kemi Badenoch used to work at McDonalds. Now she’s become the breakout star of the Tory Party. At a small dinner party earlier this year—months before Boris Johnson resigned and she threw her hat in the ring to become prime minister, coming closer than anyone predicted—Kemi Badenoch, the 42-year-old MP for the Essex market town of Saffron Walden, was absorbed in fixing the TV so that it played cheesy early 2000s tunes. It was confusing to have to make a TV play music, but that was the only music source that night, and she went with it until Bootylicious by Destiny’s Child and Nelly’s Hot in Here rang from the speakers. That done, she sensed trouble in the kitchen, and went to help the host out with the overheating purple sprouting broccoli. She drank the good French wine with zest, and, over dinner, asked sharp questions about the government’s handling of Covid, and the best way for those in power to approach the trans debate. Her demeanor in private that night matched her public persona, which, very suddenly two weeks ago, became a matter of intense public fascination. Pundits have described Badenoch as a Tory Barack Obama, with headlines boosting her as Labour’s “worst nightmare” and the “antiwoke crusader” Britain needs. She comfortably deploys the kind of bold and direct speech about complicated ideas that seem impossible for other politicians. In other words, she speaks like a normal person. And like Obama, Badenoch is an outsider: born to Nigerian parents, raised in Lagos, she worked at McDonalds when she arrived as a teenager in the U.K. Badenoch has garnered a fierce and widespread following, feted, in one prominent commentator’s words, with having “saved the Tories.” Last week, she beat the popular former Chancellor of the Exchequer, Rishi Sunak, 56 to 34 in a Yougov poll of Tory Party members. She’s now out of the race for prime minister; the choice is now between Sunak and Liz Truss. But that almost seems secondary to what Kemi Badenoch has accomplished: A woman who doesn’t even hold a cabinet position has become the unequivocal star of the Tory Party. How this happened began with—what else?—the culture war. “What we are against is the teaching of contested political ideas as if they are accepted fact,” she thundered in a now-famous October 2020 House of Commons speech about Critical Race Theory in education, the closest thing to arresting oratory the Tory party has seen in the Commons since Margaret Thatcher. “We don’t do this with communism, we don’t do this with socialism, we don’t do it with capitalism,” she said, lambasting the promotion of CRT as “an ideology that sees my blackness as victimhood.” Half the country was appalled. Half the country was blown away. It was unsurprisingly the latter for Michael Gove, senior Tory, cabinet minister and Badenoch’s former boss (Gove was sacked by Johnson on the latter’s last night in office). “She has genuine eloquence, which comes from thinking things through from first principles,” he tells me. “Other people give the impression of ‘solidity to pure wind,’ in George Orwell’s words, but the thing about Kemi is that what she says just cuts to the essential. It feels like you’re gulping down fresh air after emerging from a fetid swamp.” Swamp-like is a good way to describe the weather at a reception for free speech campaigners held on the House of Lords terrace earlier this month, where some 200 people sipped champagne and Pimms overlooking the Thames and pretended not to notice the sweat pouring off themselves and everyone else. Badenoch was called in at the last minute to replace a Covid-stricken Martina Navratilova, and the crowd was palpably electrified. She talked about her slow but ultimately successful battle to get a bill through parliament banning gender-neutral toilets in all public buildings in England, and in response to a cheeky question from the floor she quipped that yes, she was sure she was a woman. Badenoch is a mother of three whose husband is the banker Hamish Badenoch (they met at the Dulwich and West Norwood Conservative club in south London in 2009). She was born Kemi Adegoke in London, where her mother had been sent from Lagos for an obstetric referral. Mother and baby immediately returned to Nigeria, and Badenoch “didn’t even know I was a British citizen” until a family friend suggested she investigate her claim to a passport. At 16, in 1996, she recalled, “things were going badly in Nigeria”—universities were closed, the economy was in freefall—and “I just needed to get out.” Her mother had a friend who lived near London with spare room. So with the £100 given to her by her father, Badenoch headed for the U.K., attending school in a South London suburb and working in a variety of odd jobs, including at McDonalds, to support herself. She enrolled at the University of Sussex, where she got a degree in computer science in 2003. (This is unusual in a field of candidates that still tend to study history, politics, English or classics at Oxford—the alma mater of the two remaining contenders, Sunak and Truss.) Having joined the Conservative Party in 2005 at 25 years old, she hustled and lost multiple elections, until in 2017 she was finally given the Tory safe seat of Saffron Walden. Few people outside the Westminster bubble had heard her name until that October 2020 speech, and then, in the febrile atmosphere of the post-George Floyd moment, suddenly Kemi Badenoch was all people could talk about. I remember getting a dozen texts sending links to the video from friends across the political spectrum, some secretly in love, some absolutely horrified and some openly cheering. Badenoch has rightly made a name for herself as the candidate who is “antiwoke, loves Britain, and is not afraid to take on the ‘hateful’ Left,” as the Daily Telegraph put it, but her conservatism goes well beyond questions of culture. She voted for Brexit, she loathes over-regulation and the expanding state bequeathed by Covid, and she is wary of green policies “bankrupting” the economy. Her political sensibilities emerged from her experience of Africa—though in the opposite way that adherents of Black Lives Matter would want. “Growing up in a place like Nigeria means you appreciate what we have in the UK and in the West,” she told me on the phone on Wednesday, after she had dropped out of the race. “One of the things I find frustrating is the ethno-nationalism that you get in many countries like Nigeria: ‘Oh, we’re going to do things our way, we’re not going to do things the Western way.’ People start looking at things like free markets and capitalism as being Western things. And actually the whole world would be in a much better place if they adopted these systems, free markets in particular,” she said. “They are still the best way of lifting people out of poverty.” Poster Comment: She is married to a White man whose first name Hamish is Scottish. Post Comment Private Reply Ignore Thread Top • Page Up • Full Thread • Page Down • Bottom/Latest Begin Trace Mode for Comment # 1.
#1. To: Horse (#0)
Farange says Tories doomed unless they pick her
#2. To: Ada (#1)
I despise Farange. Why? Because he wants to continue bringing in Blacks from Commonwealth countries. They have about 20 million too many foreigners. What is the UK's population? About 68 million. And all that in an area less than our tenth largest state, Wyoming.
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