Kemi Badenoch is the true inheritor of Thatcher’s legacy
Conservative members like myself looked at the Tory leadership over the last 3 years and recalled the scene in Orwell’s Animal Farm where the animals looked from the pigs to the humans and found no difference at all. There was much talk about getting things done, but we were served a concoction of Lib-Dem-lite gruel. We needed a leadership who had the conviction and the capacity to make government work.
Kemi Badenoch gets this; her message reminds me of a young Margaret Thatcher who managed to do two key things at same time: Kill off a self-serving and corrupt trade union movement, and energise the country with a message based on optimism and agency.
Badenoch’s equivalent of the trade union movement is the civil service, a mechanism of government which has become biased and self-serving. Ministers have regularly told me how they were hampered by politically activists’ civil servants. They go on to point to the TV series Yes Minister as an accurate depiction of life in Whitehall.
Like Thatcher fighting the unions in the 1980s, Kemi’s message is that we need to clean house so that the government can work again. Her rallying optimism comes from her own story of coming to Britain and using all its opportunities to rise through the ranks to become a top politician and a serious contender for future Prime Minister.
Kemi Badenoch has emerged as someone who wants a Conservatism that isn’t complicated. Like a young Margaret Thatcher, she has had to show great courage in the face of vindictiveness. The best example was how she championed my report on race and ethnic disparities in March 2021. The report was commissioned by Boris Johnson in response to our disturbances in the UK after the George Floyd murder in May 2020.
Suddenly the whole country seemed to be signed up members of Black Lives Matter, gripped by guilt as we watched an American crisis that somehow was supposed to show that racism was everywhere in Britain. My predominantly black and Asian Commissioners said we were not America, and although racism exists, the disparities were driven by geography, family structure and agency. Also, poor white groups had worse outcomes than many black groups.
The report needed a champion and Kemi stepped forward, almost single handedly taking on the Labour naysayers, crushing them ruthlessly from the dispatch box.
Boris Johnson has called his memoirs Unleashed, but the title better applies to Kemi. The report was clearly the best thing that the Johnson administration had Commissioned but without unleashing Kemi, then cowardly Labour and their activists would have tried to kill it. Instead, she authored an exciting and sensible response document called Inclusive Britain with over an additional 50 recommendations across government which today stands as an excellent policy document for a united Britain.
As I watched Kemi “unleashed” in those days after my report, it was clear that Labour feared her, and the liberal media saw her as dangerous to their politics. What better qualification do we have for our next party leader and hopefully next Prime Minister?
Some say that Kemi isn’t in the league of Miss T, but this is unfair. Margaret Thatcher faced a barrage of abuse during her time, but she didn’t have to face the relentless abuse of social media. This is a cruel and ruthless time to be a political leader, where media scrutiny is everywhere and applied by everyone.
My sense is that, of the two candidates for leadership, Thatcher would have chosen Kemi. They both had a background in the hard sciences: Maggie studied Chemistry at Oxford and Kemi graduated in engineering. Also, they are both outsiders, having no special privilege like some old Etonian Tories. One the daughter of a Greengrocer the other the daughter of a Nigerian GP. Even Nigel Farage would have to have some admiration for their self-made-woman pedigree.
Lord Sewell is the author of Black Success: The Surprising Truth