When it was over on Sunday evening, Rishi Sunak and Liz Truss are said to have looked at each other and asked: Why are we doing this to each other? On Monday, they both announced that they didn’t want to continue like this. They withdrew their participation in the third TV candidate debate planned for Tuesday to succeed British Prime Minister Boris Johnson. The second on Sunday evening was just as devastating as the first on Friday. Sky, the organizing broadcaster, then canceled the debate altogether. This may be a relief for Sunak, the ex-finance minister, and Truss, the foreign minister, but not for Kemi Badenoch.
In both TV duels, the five candidates attacked each other, sometimes in a nasty, subtle way, mostly rather unabashedly open, so that one could quickly forget that this was an internal party competition. If the two television studios had been boxing rings, only the two underdogs Tom Tugendhat and Kemi Badenoch would have come out of the ring standing. Badenoch’s rhetorical skills in particular may have contributed a great deal to the fact that the very party members who still often misspell their names in Internet forums now even see them ahead in individual polls. Just a few weeks ago, beyond Westminster and Saffron Walden, hardly anyone had ever heard of Kemi Badenoch, but the events are making these weeks seem like years.
Badenoch was born in Wimbledon, London, in 1980 to Nigerian parents. The mother is a physiology professor and the father was a GP, as family doctors in Great Britain call it. She grew up mostly in Lagos, Nigeria and the United States before returning to England when she was 16. She studied computer technology at the University of Sussex, graduating in 2003, after which she first worked in the IT sector for a few years while studying law on the side. She joined the party in 2005 when she was 25. Twelve years later, in 2017, she was running as a candidate for the safe House of Commons seat in Saffron Walden, a rural region in north-west England. Since then, Kemi Badenoch has been a member of the British House of Commons.
She may not look like what you would imagine a Tory politician to look like. But that is deceptive
It is this story of hers that now makes her so interesting to some in the party. Badenoch, 42 and a mother of three, does have a few Tory-esque entries on her CV, having worked in the financial sector for some time and intermittently holding a senior management role at Tory-affiliated magazine The Spectator, where Boris Johnson was already editor-in-chief. But she doesn’t come from the Eton-Oxford-Cambridge environment that is usual for Tories, and a childhood in Lagos is also rather untypical for conservatives.
Their political positions are largely those of the staunchly conservative members who will soon decide who will be the next prime minister. She is a staunch Brexit supporter, and as Prime Minister she will also ensure, as she says, that the police no longer waste time fighting hate speech on the Internet, but instead deal with “real crimes in the neighborhood”. Michael Gove, one of the most prominent Tories, promised her his support early on, praising above all her intellect and her “no-bullshit approach”, i.e. her fearless clarity.
However, in order for Kemi Badenoch to actually move into Downing Street on September 6, she would first have to survive a few more rounds of Parliament this week. The 358 Tory MPs decide on the two finalists – and the favorites so far tend to be Sunak, Mordaunt and Truss. But nobody in the Tories doubts that Kemi Badenoch will be heard more often in the future.