Cammy Badenoch is unlikely to become the next prime minister, but on the secondary criterion of political party leadership contests – raising one’s profile and securing a prized top post under the winner – she has already done well.
The Saffron Walden MP and former Equalities Minister has definitely edged Suella Braverman in the mini-race for fame among right-wing culture warriors, securing a top-level endorsement from Michael Gove and some positive poll data.
One Gove ally said the former promotion secretary saw Badenoch as “brilliant” and capable of making tough decisions. There is also reciprocal loyalty. In the 2019 Tory leadership election, Badenoch stepped down as deputy leader of the Conservative Party to work on Gove’s campaign.
A YouGov poll of Conservative members published on Wednesday showed Badenoch, 42, second on the list of people who would like to succeed Boris Johnson, although well behind Penny Mordaunt and just ahead of Rishi Sunak and Liz Truss.
This is a prominent place for someone who has been an MP for five years, remains unknown to most of the public and has never held a ministerial post above junior level, most recently a joint Foreign Office post/promotion from which she resigned a week.
But among narrower circles of Conservative MPs and, to some extent, party members, Badenoch’s brand of confident, outspoken austerity on shrinking the state, combined with an enthusiasm for culture wars, has brought her some notoriety.
Her official campaign speech on Tuesday emphasized her desire for “free markets.” [and] limited government,” promising that an administration she leads will “reject Twitter’s priorities.”
As with most speeches, there were few details, but what waste-cutting ideas it contained may be difficult to put into practice, such as the idea that money could be saved by taking resources from “redundant support staff and peripheral activities” in schools.
Badenoch’s comment that the police should “focus on neighborhood crime and not waste time and resources worrying about hurt feelings online” is likely to go down well with Tory members, even if some polls suggest they don’t are as attuned to culture war themes as some of the party’s MPs.
Badenoch has been particularly critical of anything to do with ethnicity-based identity politics, pursuing it with a zeal that her supporters say is refreshingly clear, but which others find sometimes aggressive.
When Badenoch resigned as a minister last week, the Voice, Britain’s only black national newspaper, tweeted: “Gaslight Minister, Kemi Badenoch resigns.” Although the tweet was later deleted, it illustrated the passions she causes
Badenoch says her worldview was shaped by her experiences growing up in Nigeria, where her parents moved from Wimbledon, south-west London, after she was born, then her experiences in England, where she returned at the age of 16.
Born to two doctors, she said in her maiden speech in the House of Commons that she experienced poverty because of economic mismanagement in Nigeria.
She experienced racism—though she didn’t call it that—at the hands of a teacher who told her to consider becoming a nurse when she said she wanted to be a doctor. “I can understand where the teacher was coming from … assuming that we are all a disadvantaged minority because of the color of our skin. It’s typical of left-wing thinking,” she told the Daily Mail in 2017.
As equality minister, Badenoch was the public face of the government’s defense of the Sewell report on ethnic differences in the UK, which came under considerable criticism for downplaying structural factors – ones Badenoch insists do not exist.
Simon Woolley, the fellow founder of Operation Black Vote, said Badenoch had particularly strong opinions on such matters.
“Of course we’ve always wanted a black prime minister – symbolism is important – but the rhetoric of candidates like Kemi Badenoch around the Sewell report and the potential dismissal of academics articulating racial inequalities that are framed as ‘theoretical’ is bitterly disappointing,” he said.
“The reality has been revealed by Covid-19 that systemic racial inequality still unfortunately prevails. No prime minister, black or white, can effectively address systemic and persistent racial inequality if its very existence is fundamentally denied.
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