Thread: Kemi Badenoch elected new Tory leader

an excellent choice.

she's my kind of immigrant .... one who loves the uk.


Rise of Kemi Badenoch – from childhood in Nigeria to leader of the Conservative Party.

MP is the first black woman to lead a major political party and the first major party leader to identify as a ‘first generation immigrant’

Ethan Croft
Sunday Political Correspondent






Kemi Badenoch has been elected leader of the Conservative Party

Kemi Badenoch’s victory in the Conservative Party leadership contest marks a number of milestones in British political history.

She is the first black woman to lead a major political party, and only the second woman to serve as permanent Leader of the Opposition after Margaret Thatcher.

Most strikingly, perhaps, Mrs Badenoch is the first major party leader to identify as a “first generation immigrant”.


She was born Olukemi Olufunto Adegoke in Britain in January 1980 after her Nigerian parents travelled to a specialist maternity hospital in south London to receive private healthcare.

After their daughter was born, the Adegokes returned to Nigeria where Mrs Badenoch grew up.

But because she was born in Britain before a Thatcher-era change to citizenship laws Olukemi, known as “Kemi”, later found she was able to claim British citizenship, a discovery she has likened to finding out she possessed one of Willy Wonka’s “Golden Tickets”.


Aged 16, she returned to Britain to live with a family friend in Wimbledon and study A-levels while working part-time in McDonald’s.

Mrs Badenoch has described her childhood in Lagos, Nigeria’s largest city, as “middle-class” when compared to her “very poor” surroundings. Her father Femi worked in the city as a GP while her mother Feyi was a professor of physiology at the University of Lagos.

“Being middle class in Nigeria,” she has said, “still meant having no running water or electricity, sometimes taking your own chair to school.”


In her maiden speech as an MP she described “living without electricity and doing my homework by candlelight, because the state electricity board could not provide power, and fetching water in heavy, rusty buckets from a borehole a mile away, because the nationalised water company could not get water out of the taps.”


Mrs Badenoch has recalled doing manual labour as part of her high school education. “Mostly it meant getting up at 5am and cutting grass endlessly. Everyone had their own machete. Because that’s how you cut grass in Africa. There were no lawn mowers. We had to tend our own patches. I still feel as if I have got the blisters,” she has said.

In 1996, during one of the country’s periodic political and economic crises, Mrs Badenoch left Lagos for London, where she studied A-levels while living with a family friend in Wimbledon.


She has said the blight of corruption in the Nigeria of her childhood helped form her political opinions. Mrs Badenoch also remembers being inspired by Margaret Thatcher as a girl, when she was often prohibited from participating in certain school activities because of her sex.

After taking A-levels in maths, biology and chemistry, she embarked on a computer systems engineering course at Sussex University.

She joined the Conservative Party in 2005, partly because of her irritation with the “stupid Lefty white kids” she encountered at university.


Mrs Badenoch met her husband, investment banker Hamish Badenoch, in her local south London Conservative association in 2009. They married in 2012 and have two daughters and a son.

She worked at Coutts Bank and The Spectator before being elected as a Conservative member of the London Assembly in 2015 and later Tory MP for Saffron Walden in 2017.

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I think you punch down on Chitty for fun,Not all have spent their life writing and I understand why Joe quotes those whom he agrees with. We are not in in his shoes but Cy he and his family are living there so have a view and experience life in UK today.We do not have to accept hus conclusions but to belittle a person as many do me or Tax or Armstrong or BLD because of their education level or lack of it seems crass to me.

What we do have is a new political landscape since Labour win on July 4 2024.

What the public always want everywhere is low tax and high levels of services, like all children gain with no pain, effortless ease the sybarites dream, of course that circle may never be squared.

Labour UK finance minister Rachel Reeves has offered some stromg medicine but will almost certainly fail as the supply of credit in sterling unlike US greenback a reserve currency is limited by the interest on gilts as Truss abruptly discovered, sure you can borrow like a last ditch gambler but at what price? Sadly huge infrastructure was not financed when interest was almost zero.

The hard reality for all bar USA (which in medium term can keep printing) is democracies have ageing populations who grew up in a golden age of social welfare mainly free health, education,

A major difference the frail, handicapped and elderly were often looked after by unpaid daughters or other family members for a short period until death.People were terrified rightly so of being put in a "HOME" often a crowded dowdy shabby place far from base surounded by doddering senile idiots like me a kinda 3D TD!!

The success of healthier air , better medicine means many women can live 3 decades post retirement and men 2, however in decline even those with families often far away or with working daughters expect the state to help find social care at home and later residential then palliative care at the end.The lack of wheelchair accesible bathrooms and WCs often the cause and a planning opportunity for future building permits!

Even with minimum wage immigrant women and they are 99% women mainly from Commnwealth plus many Philipinos who leave the care of their kids and elederly to feed wash the sheets feed the frail .Brexit own goal has limited the supply of cheap E Europeans.

Another hidden factor that is bankrupting councils has been the "progressive " attempt to integrate those who formerly languished in residential mental institutions.

These were the grim "funny farms on the hill every coity had one such horrid Victorian dorms I visited in the 1970s when my gf was nursing training there. A real Bedlam , hell on earth where heavy meds were the only way 2 small teenage girls could cope with 30 large sometimes violent very sad disturbed old men. I can see and smell it now, A Eurpean med pro an ex colleague assured me on a placement in a C Mai hospital such patients were chained to the beds in 2017!

Such care needs and funding has a direct bearing on the need for immigration, albeit perhaps better controlled/managed or for the duration of a contract like the old gastarbeiter system, reality is many may marry and never return.
I never hear people objecting to those few Australians Kiwis Candians or white American anglophone immigrants the reality is objection to muslims and blacks Indians, Roma, Pakistanisrefugees from places like Afghanistan, Syria and Horrn of Africa with very different norms, In 1950-60s these same sentiments against the Irish and West Indians , the last off the boat syndrome.A reminder from teh London I grew up in where the Met when not organising bank raids were punching "Sooties"





Another issue is special needs education. I am all for integration , no one left behind , and happy to contribute so all kids capable go to the same school, of course some will not excel at sport or academic subjects but from the old alternative was isolation or only with peers.

This costs many will need a learning assistant in class , and ever more expensive transportation to and from home which in UK is crippling local services in councils of all polirical control , Birmingham Croydon and many other technically bankrupt by such obligations.

I read this is a statutory legal obligation and is ring fenced spending so strapped councils have cut already pared discretionary type things I took for granted, parks, swimming pools, leisure centres, libraries, clubs for youth OAPs, and many other activities that brought people together who could not afford due to income or mobility to buy such things.

I was lucky well paid in one of the richest cities on earth at the twilight of it's Imperial wealth , when olde rBrits hadnt realized the USA was top dog, I could go into the West End London to a film, concert, party, rugby or football match and afford to eat in restaurants on dates, buy books for college and if I wanted a car foreign holiday even aged 17 there was plenty of part time work, at school I did paper rounds worked delivery, Christmas Post, in summers as intern in an international bank , that was normal for all in London, rich kids didnt even need that to get first car or flat.

The so called swinging sixties that window between the contraceptive pill and AIDS was a lucky time to be a loaded lad, I just assumed it was normal, Paris looked poor and Madrid, Segovia primitive ,of course only 2 decades since ww2 Belgium Germany, Austria Czechia I visted then even poorer.In the 1970s only places I saw that looked richer better were Holland Denmark, Montreal and Florida.

Which brings me to the central inequality in modern UK the huge transfer of housing stock, hence security comfort and a base to raise kids back to Victorian rental model which leaves many young unable and unwilling to fund taxes for anything but esp for single old people living in 5 bed suburban homes worth a few million pounds/dollars .

Labour can never satisfy the elastic demands and all attempts even with necessary ever more immigrants , tighter spending or higher taxes will all be unpopular.

There is however a new "Farage Factor" may not be him the pound shop Trump.
For the first time since WW2 the UK right are divided like N Ireland.

For years the progressives were divided betwen Nationalists , Libe Dems and Greens against a right under a neo liberal Hayek sponsored Thatcherite banner since 1979.
The Reform party , brexit and immigration have split the right for now. For Kemi if she swing right to recover the millions of Reform voters she has no chance of gaining support from those who went LibDem or Labour and vice versa, if she flops and a centrist Tory softer on immigration like Tom Tugendhat replaces her he may lose votes to Reform.

I think so called Jimmy Dimly aka James Cleverly wise to refuse a job with her and as her arrogance leads to failure he could well become the next leader if not PM, Fortunately I shall be on the long grass by then or too old/addled /pickled/smoked to care.

Have a nice day folks Monday may be the last non Trump day for a while enjoy !

FFS we are all pink on the inside! All members of the human race.

The real problem here is that both a Starmer and Badenoch represent extremes of their political beliefs. Badenoch may be more obvious in her hatred of non Brit’s, but Starmer is hiding his true colours behind his fake leadership, with a couple of MPs who will stop at nothing to gain higher rank.

Both Reeves and the other hanger on will become even more powerful based on their history and background.

No Cyrille, I don’t give a toss what you think.