Kemi Badenoch

Olukemi Olufunto Adegoke Badenoch (née Adegoke; born 2 January 1980) is a British politician who has served as Leader of the Opposition and Leader of the Conservative Party since November 2024. Badenoch previously worked in the Cabinet for prime ministers Liz Truss and Rishi Sunak from 2022 to 2024. She was elected Member of Parliament (MP) for North West Essex, previously Saffron Walden, in 2017.

In 2012, Badenoch unsuccessfully contested a seat in the London Assembly, but became a member of the London Assembly after Victoria Borwick was elected as an MP in 2015. A supporter of Brexit in the 2016 referendum, Badenoch was elected to the House of Commons at the 2017 general election.

After Boris Johnson became Prime Minister in July 2019, Badenoch was appointed Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Children and Families. In the February 2020 reshuffle she was appointed Exchequer Secretary to the Treasury and Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Equalities. In September 2021 she was promoted to Minister of State for Equalities and appointed Minister of State for Local Government, Faith and Communities.

In July 2022, Badenoch resigned from government in protest at Johnson's leadership; she stood unsuccessfully to replace him in the July–September 2022 party leadership election. After Liz Truss was appointed prime minister in September 2022, Badenoch was appointed Secretary of State for International Trade and President of the Board of Trade and was appointed to the Privy Council; she was reappointed Trade Secretary by Truss's successor, Rishi Sunak, the following month, also becoming Minister for Women and Equalities.

In the February 2023 Cabinet reshuffle, Badenoch assumed the position of Secretary of State for Business and Trade following the merging of the Department for International Trade with elements of the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy. Badenoch retained the responsibilities of Women and Equalities Minister. Following the Conservatives' defeat in the 2024 general election, Badenoch was appointed Shadow Secretary of State for Housing, Communities and Local Government in Sunak's Shadow Cabinet and later launched her bid to become leader of the Conservative Party in the 2024 leadership election. She defeated Robert Jenrick in the members' ballot, becoming party leader and Leader of the Opposition.

Early life and education

Olukemi Olufunto "Kemi" Adegoke was born on 2 January 1980 in Wimbledon, London. Her mother Feyi Adubifa travelled from Nigeria to the United Kingdom for medical treatment and gave birth in St Teresa's Maternity Hospital. This was before the British Nationality Act 1981 abolished automatic birthright citizenship for those born in the UK; Feyi then returned to Nigeria shortly after Olukemi was born. In interviews, Badenoch denied claims she was an "anchor baby" and asserted that her family did not know she was eligible for a British passport until she was a teenager.

Her father, Femi Adegoke, was a general practitioner who later founded a publishing company in Nigeria and became an activist for the rights of the Yoruba people. Her mother Feyi was a professor of physiology at the University of Lagos. Adegoke has a brother and a sister. According to a profile in The Times, Badenoch is the first cousin once removed of former Nigerian Vice-President Yemi Osinbajo.

Badenoch spent her childhood living in Lagos, Nigeria, and in the United States, where her mother lectured. Badenoch has spoken about having a "very tough upbringing" in Nigeria. Her family lived in the middle class neighbourhood of Surulere and she was a student at the private International School of Lagos. Badenoch has described her background as "middle-class" but said in 2018 "Being middle class in Nigeria still meant having no running water or electricity, sometimes taking your own chair to school" and claimed that her family went through "periods of poverty" due to inflation. She returned to the UK at the age of 16 to live with a friend of her mother's owing to the deteriorating political and economic situation in Nigeria, which had affected her family. During her parliamentary maiden speech Badenoch stated that she was "to all intents and purposes a first-generation immigrant".

Badenoch has claimed in several interviews to have been offered a partial scholarship to Stanford University when she was 16 to study pre-medicine on the basis of her high grades, but to have been unable to attend because the scholarship offered was not enough to cover costs. However, Stanford did not offer a pre-med course, and the Stanford admissions officer at that time responsible for the allocation of bursaries to international students subsequently denied this happened. Badenoch studied A-Levels in biology, chemistry and maths, at Phoenix College, a sixth form college in Morden, south London. She achieved a B in biology, a B in chemistry and a D in maths, claiming that "no one at the school had pushed [her] to fulfil [her] potential" despite being a "straight A student" while in Nigeria and that being let down by "the soft bigotry of low expectations" pushed her to become a conservative. She consequently missed out on her place at Warwick University. Concurrently, she worked at a branch of McDonald's, among other jobs, including New Look. During this time, she said she "became working class". Badenoch studied Computer Systems Engineering at the University of Sussex, completing a Master of Engineering (MEng) degree in 2003. She studied law at Birkbeck, University of London, graduating with a Bachelor of Laws (LLB) degree in 2009, and becoming a Fellow of Birkbeck in 2018.

Early career

Badenoch initially worked within the information technology sector, first as a software engineer at Logica (later CGI Inc) from 2003 to 2006. While working there she read Law part-time at Birkbeck, University of London, graduating as Bachelor of Laws (LLB) in 2009. Badenoch then worked as a systems analyst at the Royal Bank of Scotland Group, before pursuing a career in consultancy and financial services, working as an associate director at private bank and wealth manager Coutts from 2006 to 2013 and later a digital director for The Spectator from 2015 to 2016.

Political career

Badenoch joined the Conservative Party in 2005 at the age of 25. At the 2010 general election, she contested the Dulwich and West Norwood constituency and came third, behind the Labour Party incumbent MP Tessa Jowell and the Liberal Democrat candidate Jonathan Mitchell.

London Assembly

In 2012, Badenoch stood for the Conservatives in the London Assembly election, where she was placed fifth on the London-wide list; Badenoch was not elected as Conservatives won only three seats.

Three years later, in the 2015 general election, Victoria Borwick was elected to the House of Commons and resigned her seat on the London Assembly. The fourth-placed candidate on the list, Suella Braverman, was also elected as an MP, so Badenoch became the new Assembly Member. She went on to retain her seat in the Assembly at the 2016 election, being succeeded in 2017 by fellow Conservative Susan Hall.

Badenoch supported Brexit in the 2016 UK EU membership referendum.

In 2018, Badenoch admitted that, a decade earlier, as a prank, she had hacked into the website of Deputy Leader of the Labour Party Harriet Harman; Harman accepted Badenoch's apology, but the matter was reported to Action Fraud, the UK's cyber crime reporting centre.

Parliamentary career

Badenoch was shortlisted to be the Conservative Party candidate for the marginal Hampstead and Kilburn constituency at the 2017 general election, but was unsuccessful. She was subsequently selected for the same election as the Conservative candidate for Saffron Walden, a safe seat for her party, which she won with 37,629 votes and a majority of 24,966 (41.0%).

Early tenure

In her maiden speech as an MP on 19 July 2017, she described the vote for Brexit as "the greatest ever vote of confidence in the project of the United Kingdom" and cited her personal heroes as the Conservative politician Winston Churchill, Airey Neave, and Margaret Thatcher.

In the same month, Badenoch was selected to join the 1922 Executive Committee. In September, she was appointed to the parliamentary Justice Select Committee. She was appointed as the Conservative Party's Vice Chair for Candidates in January 2018.

She voted for Theresa May's Brexit withdrawal agreement in early 2019. In the indicative votes on 27 March, she voted against a referendum on a withdrawal agreement and against a customs union with the EU. In October, Badenoch voted for Johnson's withdrawal agreement.

In January 2019, Badenoch was criticised by a number of Labour MPs for suggesting that Tulip Siddiq was "making a point" by delaying her scheduled caesarean section in order to attend a House of Commons vote on Brexit.

In the run-up to the 2019 Conservative Party leadership election, Badenoch was tipped as a possible contender just two years into her tenure in parliament. She instead supported the campaign of Michael Gove. In the December 2019 general election, she was re-elected with an increased majority of 27,594 (43.7%) votes.