Kemi Badenoch: I’m black but I’m also a woman, a mum and an MP

Kemi Badenoch has just triumphed for the Tories in Saffron Walden. She tells Rosamund Urwin about diversity, Brexit and backing May
Daniel Hambury/Stella Pictures
Rosamund Urwin14 June 2017

Kemi Badenoch, the new Conservative MP for Saffron Walden, is telling me how voters treat our elected representatives. “They don’t look at us as public servants any more, but as punching bags,” she proclaims. “They don’t do it to your face, but behind a keyboard. During the campaign, I was told, ‘you better watch out’.”

Threats are so common, they were discussed at the 1922 meeting on Monday night. “So many female MPs talked about how they’d been abused. One man said his wife and kids received threats. There’s a new intimidating atmosphere.”

This mood had convinced her she wouldn’t win her seat, despite inheriting a 24,991 majority from Sir Alan Haselhurst. But hers was only 25 votes lower, and she gushes with gratitude about her electorate: “People say: ‘They’d vote for a donkey if it stood for the Conservatives here’. They wouldn’t. I’ve got to be perfect as an MP now!”

The night, though, was “bittersweet”, given the party’s performance. Her election post-mortem downplays the importance of social media - “Young people know how to switch off ads. The strategy wasn’t the issue – it was the content”, while pointing to Labour’s activist army, and a Tory failure to convey the benefits of their manifesto to the young: “People are used to it being a basket of goodies for older voters. This was about inter-generational fairness.” The terror attacks, she adds, made it “hard to go out and talk about things. It flattened the mood.”

Was it a mistake to make the campaign so presidential? “No. Given there was only six weeks, I could barely get up and running, so it was a choice about who we wanted to deliver Brexit. Until the manifesto ‘wobble’, the reaction was 100 per cent positive. People loved Theresa May. They’re fickle.”

She is still Team May. “As a female MP, having a female Prime Minister is so important. I don’t want to see her dragged through horrible experiences. It does put women off politics.” When she was on the London Assembly, she sometimes disagreed with May - Badenoch supported stop-and-search, for example - but she says she always respected May’s position: “This is not the time to start making trouble, because it will bring the government down if we’re not united.”

At the 1922 meeting, MPs rallied. “There’s a tendency in politics to go after someone who’s wounded, and we didn’t have that. Mrs May struck the right note. In fairness, she got 43.7 per cent of the vote. I’ve bumped into some Labour MPs – including one who told me she is going to be the next Prime Minister – and they really feel triumphant, like they’ve won. We may not have done as well as we hoped, but they didn’t win.”

Daniel Hambury/Stella Pictures

We’re sitting in Portcullis House at the MP-only tables. I first met her as a candidate (and London Assembly member) two weeks ago while she was door-knocking, her blue rosette pinned to her trenchcoat. Badenoch’s daughter Eni, aged three, and son Ralph, seven months, had an infection but she was unflustered: “I’m always dealing with 100 things at once.”

Saffon Walden is Tory country. One house even had “Churchillian” inscribed above the door. It’s verdant. Quiet. Some might call it parochial. And Badenoch is the kind of Tory who provokes Spectator journalists into breathless hagiography. As a teenager she worked at McDonald’s and did her A-levels part-time: “My hair smelled of fries.” Her career included spells at the IT consultancy Logica, the Queen’s banker Coutts and, yes, as the Speccie’s head of digital. She passes the “would you have a drink with them?” test with ease. Oh, and she’s a Brexiteer, who - despite being born in and living in London (though she grew up in Nigeria and the US) has criticised London’s liberal elite.

Brexit actually split her family. She recalls leaving the train station one day and having a leaflet thrust in her face by a Remain campaigner. It was her husband, who works for Deutsche Bank.

Though she admits Brexit will be “tough initially”, she still considers leaving the EU the right decision. What if we get no deal? “My husband’s nervous. If companies think: ‘We don’t want to be here’ it will impact a lot of people. But I don’t think it will get to that. People talk about a divorce bill. You can’t be married to 27 people. It wasn’t a marriage — it was a business partnership that we have decided isn’t quite working for us. Will it be tough? All change is tough.”

Badenoch is a take-no-prisoners type. On the health service, she says we need tough conversations about what to fund: “People who work in the NHS say it needs to change, but as soon as you try to change anything, it’s: ‘Save our NHS!’ I don’t envy Jeremy Hunt.”

She is, though, “very grateful” to the NHS, whose staff (at King’s) prevented her miscarrying her daughter. “I have a weak cervix. I went into labour at 20 weeks, had emergency surgery and they were able to reverse it. The amount I have cost the NHS for maternity services is phenomenal.”

It is on race, though, that I suspect Badenoch’s views will surprise most people. Following the election, the Conservatives now have 19 ethnic minority MPs, compared with 32 in Labour, which has fewer seats. But Banedoch still says the Tories are “doing very well - I got one of the safest seats. It’s difficult for people of ethnic minority backgrounds not to think that not getting on as a candidate is because the party isn’t doing enough. There are many white men who really want to get on, and they’re not getting on. It’s very competitive.”

Daniel Hambury/Stella Pictures

She has accused Labour of thinking “it owns minorities” and believing race trumps all: “It’s: ‘You’re black, this is what you care about’. But identity is multi-faceted. I’m black but I’m also a woman, a Mum. They talk about a ‘black community’ — there’s nothing really like that. People have the same issues wherever they come from. Schools. Hospitals.”

She believes Labour is stuck in the Seventies. “There were lots of problems then in areas with ethnic-minority populations. People who went through that think certain parties” — she means the Tories — “didn’t do as much to tackle the problem. Things have moved on. My children are mixed race. I want them to think: ‘This is our country, our father’s family has been here for thousands of years’.”

Her worst experiences, she says, were “as an ethnic majority” in Nigeria (she left at 16 when the country was under a military dictatorship and the universities closed). The police also earn her praise: “They’re the best in the world. We don’t have all the horrible stuff that’s happened in America here. People pick on one bad experience, blow it up and say: ‘This is institutional racism’. That’s not to say race relations are perfect, but [Britain] is as good as it gets.”

Has she experienced racism? “Errm. It might have happened and I didn’t notice, I just thought: ‘This person is a dick’.” But then she gives me an incident list. A woman once said Badenoch wasn’t “really African because I was wearing expensive clothes (Zara!). I told her what I thought of her views... and she whacked me on the cheek.” At Sussex university, the father of a student she reported to the police for drugs came to local bars to find her. “I felt that was because of my skin colour. I wasn’t the only person involved but I was the one he was fixated with.” A woman on the doorstep asked her: “Why aren’t you standing in a black area? I’ll vote Ukip”. Banedoch sounds blase as she says this. “I also know this woman doesn’t want a playground built on the village green, so she’s obviously a crank.”

She tells me she has a “very high benchmark” for what constitutes racism. But when we discussed the huge majority she’s inheriting, she mentioned two people who have lost large ones in the past — Dawn Butler and Oona King: both Labour, but non-white women.

She could have named Zac Goldsmith. Badenoch helped with his failed mayoral bid and was repeatedly told by friends “it’s a racist campaign” for its fixation on spurious allegations about Sadiq Khan and extremism. “It was a horrible campaign for us. I wish I could go back in time and say, ‘Stop! This will backfire!’” She adds, though, that “the key attack line was not about Islamic terror — it was: ‘This is Jeremy Corbyn’s man in London’. That was negative and I didn’t really believe it. And then [it was] that Sadiq flip-flops — he tells people what they want to hear. One of the examples was the hanging out with Islamists — [the idea was] it didn’t matter who they were as long as there were votes in it, not that he was sympathetic [to them].”

She notes that she has learned an important lesson from Goldsmith - not to make promises (his was resigning over Heathrow). She smiles: “Though I always tell people what I think.”

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