Badenoch fights to bring the Tories back from oblivion with talent and charisma
Tory leader Kemi Badenoch complains that a few racists in the party believe she only made it to the top because she is black.
I mean no disrespect, but aren’t they right?
Every successful career needs an element of luck and Badenoch was the right black woman in the right place at the right time.
This is not to deny her talent, her charisma, her hard work. It merely acknowledges that when she was making her first attempts to climb the greasy pole, the world was different.
It was deemed unacceptable to say certain things, on pain of being branded racist. They might have seemed obvious and common sense, but you still couldn’t say them as a white person because that marked you as privileged, elitist, maybe even colonialist.
If there was a statue of you, they’d be tipping it into Bristol docks.
Then this outspoken woman from a Nigerian family stood up and said things the rest of us were only allowed to think. And she was a Conservative.
Badenoch, 45, was suddenly the stick with which the Tories could beat their woke tormentors. And she accepted the role with relish.
There was nothing false or contrived about it. She believed everything she said and took a scythe to the language of division and oppression. “This is one of the best countries in the world to be black,” she declared.
Another time she told us: “The repetition of the victimhood narrative is really poisonous for young people because they hear it and believe it.”
She came across as fierce, steely and old school Tory. Boris Johnson, as Prime Minister, liked all that and made Badenoch a Minister for equalities, levelling up, housing and communities. Liz Truss promoted her to international trade and Rishi Sunak made her Business Secretary.
In this week’s Sunday Times, Badenoch gave an interview to Charlotte Ivers, conducted in Westminster, in her constituency of North West Essex and on the Isle of Wight.
It was both careful and indiscreet. She shed little light on how she aims to take the Conservative Party from the brink of oblivion to a political force again; but she dismissed Nigel Farage, whose Reform is riding high with a polling figure of 28 per cent, as “a bullshit artist”.
“The story I want people to know,” mother of three Badenoch told Ivers, “is that I have inherited a gigantic mess and I’m cleaning it up.
“And it’s going to take a while. It’s very difficult. There’s a personal sacrifice element to it, because I could have not done it and had an easier life.”
Born in Wimbledon into a well-to-do family from Lagos – her father was a doctor and her mother a university teacher – she is married to Hamish, a banker, and has degrees in computer systems engineering and law, from the University of Sussex and Birkbeck.
Badenoch was instrumental in changing the mood in Britain – from walking on eggshells to strident protest. Remember Prime Minister Gordon Brown’s encounter with pensioner Gillian Duffy in Rochdale? She gave him a piece of her mind, partly about immigrants.
Brown, furious at aides who allowed the confrontation, got back into his car with a live Sky TV mic still attached to him and called her a “bigoted woman”. He had to call on her at home and make a grovelling apology.
Compare the contemptuous way Brown treated Duffy with the genuine concern and understanding politicians show now towards the angry crowds outside asylum hotels.
The problem for politicians such as Badenoch is that, while they might make the weather, they don’t always get to bask in it.
Badenoch’s star has been waning of late. She has been largely anonymous. Some commentators say that in her weekly duels with the Son of a Toolmaker at Prime Minister’s Questions, she fails to hold him to account.
She is measured and fair, sometimes even playful and mischievous, when her critics want her to go into mastiff mode and attack with a snarl.
Her main rival in the leadership race 10 months ago was Robert Jenrick, her Shadow Justice Secretary. As Housing Secretary, Jenrick approved a
£1 billion Docklands housing development by former Daily Express owner Richard Desmond just in time to save Desmond up to £50 million in tax. A handsome donation to Tory coffers followed.
Now Jenrick, though defeated by Badenoch, is casting himself as the Right’s logical pick for the party leadership, with stunts such as calling out fare dodgers at Tube stations.
Badenoch claims she has quelled much of the infighting among Tories and she tells Ivers that she has been listening to voters’ anger and “cleaning up the shop”.
She adds: “When the shop opens – which will be very soon – people are going to be really pleased.”
Badenoch has only a short time to impress. With the party conference season coming up and a Budget around the corner, she’s cutting it pretty fine.
*****
A sordid little pact exists between top tennis players and those who run the ATP tour and pay their wages.
The recent final of the Cincinnati Open between Carlos Alcaraz and Jannik Sinner ended with Sinner retiring after five games.
It was obvious from the opening game that Sinner should not be playing. He lacked all energy and any spark of his usual lightning movement.
By retiring after five games, he avoided a bagel (loss of the set 6-0). He also secured his prize of almost $600,000 (£447,000) for appearing in the final, merely by turning out.
And the organisers were absolved from reimbursing spectators, who had paid up to $1,000 a ticket, because the match had got under way.
It was a stitch-up. The match should never have started. Sinner wasn’t fit to play and he knew it. So did the ATP officials. The spectators were subtly but legally cheated.
I’ve seen the same thing happen in cricket, when it’s teeming down but the players are shooed on to the field for 15 minutes during a break in the rain to ensure that the crowd doesn’t have to be compensated for not seeing any play.
The only time I have ever got my money back was during the 2012 Olympics when the daughter of an old friend got me a pair of tickets to see Novak Djokovic play Fabio Fognini. We watched a couple of games and then it bucketed down.
I didn’t mind, nor expect to be reimbursed. I got to see an Olympic event, however briefly, and I got to visit Wimbledon, another first.
But my friend’s daughter insisted we try for a refund. And they paid up.
One-love to us.
*****
I like headlines that sing. (“And, Pat… make it a song I like.” – Sir Albert “Larry” Lamb, of this parish, uttered with menace).
Above all, though, I love a headline that can be sung.
I managed to write a couple during my years on the backbench of the Daily and Sunday Express. Now The Times is joining the singalong with this beauty.
“If a box that your pizza was in fits the bin, that’s amore”.
Isn’t it great? It ran above a story about purpose-built rubbish bins in Germany designed to take discarded pizza boxes, known as the Amore project.
It was a riff on the Dean Martin classic that goes: “When the moon hits your eye like a big pizza pie, that’s Amore”. Take a bow, that sub-editor. (I suspect he or she is of a certain age.)
I recall, as a callow mouse-racer on the middle bench all of half a century ago, watching with amusement and admiration bordering on awe as Rick McNeill, then night editor of the Daily Express, worked and reworked a Page 3 headline that rendered the Match of the Day theme tune into 72-point Century Bold Light.
Tum tum tum TUM tee tum tum tum tum,
Tum TUM tee tum tum tum.
Or something like that. The idea was genius. Meanwhile, Lloyd Turner got the edition out.
*****
Talking of dissonant nonsense, can’t we drop the ludicrous terrorism charge against the Irish rapper Liam Óg Ó hAnnaidh?
The 27-year-old rapper with a band called Kneecap displayed a flag in support of Hezbollah, a proscribed organisation, during a gig in Kentish Town, north London. Big deal.
That’s not terrorism. It’s free speech. You might think it misguided but that’s no reason to stop it. If you want to nick him for something, try crimes against music.
But police, obviously lacking burglaries or any incidence of shoplifting to deal with, were soon on the case of the numpty from Kneecap.
Now he’s milking it for all it’s worth. Which is precious little.
Let’s grow up and stop making fatuous laws and maybe Liam (if you think I’m typing that bloody surname again, you’ve another think coming) will go away and leave us in peace.
And by the way, if the peelers want to arrest an Irishman for terrorism, may I suggest they have a look at a wee feller I know of called Gerry Adams?
*****
The world order is changing. No, nothing to do with China or India or Brazil. The All Blacks have just been beaten by Argentina. The mighty Springboks also fell to Australia (and almost lost a second time). It’s early days, but I’m beginning to fancy England’s chances at the next rugby World Cup in two years.
RICHARD DISMORE
27 August 2025
