She was the new face of the leadership race, despite being five months older than Rishi Sunak, and gave refreshingly candid answers to questions such as whether Boris Johnson is trustworthy (“sometimes,” she said).
Although she describes herself as a “first-generation immigrant”, Olukemi Olufunto Adegoke, as she was christened, was born in Wimbledon. Her mother had come here because she wanted to give birth in the safety of a British private maternity home, and quickly returned to Lagos.
Mrs Badenoch’s father, Femi Adegoke, who died in January, was a GP and her mother Faye was a physiology lecturer (a job which also took the family to the US for a period), meaning the family was largely part of Nigeria’s upper middle class. Yemi Osinbajo, the current Nigerian Vice President, is a first cousin once removed.
However, she said, “being middle class in Nigeria still meant not having running water or electricity, sometimes bringing your own chair to school,” as well as a machete for protection.
When she was 16, when Nigeria was under military dictatorship and universities were closed, her father, whose savings were almost wiped out in a currency crash, used what he had left to buy her a plane ticket and sent her to London with £ 100 in her pocket.
He told her that her future was in her own hands because “90 percent of the things that happen to you depend on you and only 10 percent on other people.”
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