Kemi Badenoch (Photography by Tom Pilston)

13 min read04 October

Kemi Badenoch isn’t one to step back from the fight. Asked what would constitute success in the looming May elections next year, at first she seems to duck the question, but then she bravely commits to adding seats.

“Success in May is actually defining conservatism very, very clearly. At the last general election, lots of people said they don’t know what conservatism means anymore, because we’ve had too many iterations,” she says initially, before offering a more concrete measure.

“Now I need to show that we are getting a hearing from the public, and that means making sure that we hold seats; that we win seats.”

Although the last time many of the same council seats were contested  – 2022, amid Partygate – was a bad year for the Tories, and it is thought they could benefit from Labour’s difficulties in London, net gains across the country are highly ambitious for the Conservatives given the current state of the polls.

Badenoch has a few new wins under her belt: the departures of Angela Rayner and Lord Mandelson have weakened the Prime Minister. While these will be enough to see her through conference, as with Keir Starmer, MPs have set a May deadline for seeing improvements from the leadership.

The task ahead is bigger than her personal future. When Badenoch won the leadership race a little under a year ago, she declared that her party would have to spend this parliamentary term preparing for government. Her mission in reality is a far more fundamental one: to help ensure the Conservative Party continues to exist.

The 45-year-old MP for North West Essex was chosen as leader after showing a willingness – as trade secretary, women’s minister and business secretary – to confront difficult subjects and fight with real tenacity. Since the spotlight has focused on her as leader of the opposition (Loto), however, the energy is seen to be coming more from her leadership rival, Robert Jenrick, who is widely regarded as being on manoeuvres.

Badenoch’s allies point to a sign of progress: she recently gave her best Prime Minister’s Questions performance yet, for example, on the scandal around the US ambassador. As Loto, she has often appeared more comfortable giving speeches to think tanks than at the despatch box, but is that changing?

“I’m comfortable doing lots of different things,” she replies. “I think it’s important that people understand what I’m about, what I believe – that is the purpose of speeches – and also understanding my judgement.

“Keir Starmer didn’t say anything when he was the leader of the opposition. He gave lots of bland speeches about random missions and things, which he’s now had to scrap, and so no one knew what he was about.

“I’m a conviction politician. That means that people are going to criticise me, but I think in the long run they will understand why I’m doing things, why I believe certain battles are worth fighting, and I do win those battles.”

She points to the gender debate, which she was warned to steer clear of. “But in the end, I was proved right,” Badenoch continues. “We stopped Scotland from doing something very stupid. The Supreme Court has now backed up the position which I took.”

Asked whether there has been any backlash from US friends to her attacks against Mandelson’s links to Jeffrey Epstein, amid President Donald Trump’s own challenging history with the child sex offender, she says: “None whatsoever.”

There are differences between the two cases, and anyway, she adds: “What I need to focus on is the British national interest. I’m not the leader of the opposition in the United States. I’m the leader of the opposition in this country.”

I’m not somebody who wants to use political friendships to try and get on the news

Over the summer, some were confused by her decision to forego a meeting with US Vice President JD Vance. He sat down with Nigel Farage, Robert Jenrick and even Tom Skinner of “bosh” fame, but Badenoch didn’t make time for him. Why?

“Well, he gave me two times which he could make work, which would have been just for me – I didn’t want to do a group event.”

One was when she was meeting parents local to the asylum seeker hotel in Epping. The other, she was going on holiday – and her children come before the US Vice President.

“I hadn’t actually seen my children. I’m a mother of three children. I think it’s important you live by your values, and to cancel a holiday which children have been looking forward to for a meeting is not the kind of thing which I would do.”

“I don’t need a meeting with him to prove anything,” she insists. “I’m not somebody who wants to use political friendships to try and get on the news. Friendships are friendships.”

The pair do speak regularly via WhatsApp, she says. “It’s often just, ‘What do you think of what’s going on in the news?’ It’s almost always that sort of thing.”

Although Badenoch has one of the hardest jobs in politics, and Reform UK’s rise means she faces perhaps the worst conditions of any Tory leader in history, her critics accuse her of complacency.

In Lord Ashcroft’s biography of Badenoch, Blue Ambition, a colleague is quoted as saying “she’s not worth talking to before 9.30am and she hates the Westminster culture of breakfast meetings because she prefers to see her children before school”.

But Badenoch waves away persistent briefings that claim she is “lazy” and often late for meetings, such that aides have used the code “KMT” – 30 minutes behind GMT – because she apparently has her own time zone.

“It’s extraordinary, because I remember seeing those stories when I was getting up at 5am and going to bed at midnight and not seeing my children who miss their mother a lot,” she hits back.

“It’s all part of the gossip culture of Westminster. Many people don’t see how it impacts not even the individual but the people around them, their family and so on. I always made sure that that was not a culture we had in my office. We don’t brief against our colleagues, even when we’re annoyed.”

As for the more serious accusation, based on reporting by The Guardian, that she has lied about receiving an offer from Stanford University aged 16, Badenoch doubles down.

“First of all, I stand by every single thing that I’ve said. This is something that happened,” she insists. While living in Nigeria, she had done well in her SATs, filled in a form indicating the universities she was looking for, and received speculative offers, she recalls.

Former admissions staff counter that Stanford has never made offers based only on SATs. Is she trying to find the papers to prove them wrong?

“What was interesting is how many people said, ‘Your scores are high enough that we’d like to offer you a scholarship if you apply here’, and my parents said, ‘Well, we can’t afford the rest of this. You’re not going to apply there.’

“I didn’t apply to those specific universities, and they all went in the bin because I was a British citizen coming here to study. And that was that.”

Badenoch is joined by The House in one of her parliamentary offices. This one, a dark space decorated with a couple of flags, adjoins the shadow cabinet room, where her selected spokespeople meet at 4pm every Wednesday. She changed the timing of those weekly gatherings from Tuesday morning; it now matches that preferred by Margaret Thatcher as leader, an aide notes.

While Badenoch has recently appeared willing to risk Trump’s ire, slamming his claims about taking paracetamol during pregnancy as “irresponsible scaremongering”, his former adviser Elon Musk escapes her admonishment.

At the Unite the Kingdom rally organised by Tommy Robinson in September, the X owner told crowds, “violence is coming to you” and “fight back or you die”. Downing Street said the language was “dangerous”, but Badenoch refuses to condemn them.

“People are always going to say all sorts of things – things that we agree with, things that we disagree with,” she says instead. “There’s a lot of ‘we condemn this’ and ‘we condemn that’. That doesn’t actually solve problems.”

I have limits on my phone so that I know how much time I’m spending on it

She is squarely focused on reassuring people who are “upset” about Tory decisions on the economy and immigration.

“I need to show the Conservative Party has learnt from its mistakes, and I need to be saying that again and again and again, because it isn’t until you’ve said it a thousand times – ‘we’ve learnt from our mistakes, these are our new policies’ – that people will hear it.”

But is she uncomfortable with how the conversation has shifted, from talk of illegal migration to discourse around ‘remigration’ – deporting citizens with non-British heritage?

At first, she bats away the concern: “There will always be fringe conversations online. This is why politicians need to make sure that the rhetoric is always very responsible.” Then, she adds that “there is no two-tier British citizenship” and the Conservatives are “the humane party”.

“We will control borders in a very tough way, but we’re not going to be stoking up division based on skin colour. That is something that is also very personal to me as an ethnic minority leader.”

It has been suggested that she is hesitant to focus on small boats due to the accusation she was an ‘anchor baby’. Badenoch was born in a private hospital in Wimbledon, London, after her mother travelled from Nigeria for medical treatment. According to a New Statesman report, some Conservatives have privately compared her parents to small boat arrivals.

She dismisses these stories as “completely silly”, insisting she raises small boats at every opportunity. “A lot of those slurs, it’s often people who don’t even understand what the immigration situation is. There’s no such thing as an anchor baby in the UK. These are American things that are travelling over here due to social media.”

(In 1980, at the time of her birth, however, the UK did have automatic birthright citizenship. She has explained in the past that her parents were not aware and only realised when she was 14 that she was eligible for a British passport.)

For a brief moment in August, Badenoch successfully out-Reformed Reform when she promised to deport all women and children who entered Britain illegally, which would include sending some back to the Taliban. Nigel Farage had appeared to row back on his deportation plans, saying his party was “not even thinking about women and children at this stage”, though he later confirmed he would return them to Afghanistan.

The Tory leader is also a proud self-described gender-critical feminist. How does she reconcile the two? Is she comfortable with the reality those women and girls would then face back home?

“This is another reason why I talk about my own background, not from an identity politics perspective, because I hate all that, but actually from a personal experience perspective,” she says. “I am a woman. I am a mother of three children. Of course, we want to make sure that those who are most vulnerable – and often in war-torn situations, it is women and children – are looked after.”

Yet arriving on small boats are lots of young men “who are really economic migrants”, she continues, and they are “clogging up the system”. “We’ve got to crack down on this, and that probably means being tougher first before we can be kinder.”

The race between parties to announce the toughest immigration policies is evidently being fuelled by the 24-hour news cycle and online activism.

Badenoch is a fan of Jonathan Haidt, the author and social psychologist whose most recent book, The Anxious Generation, makes the convincing case that smartphone use has caused the mental illness epidemic in children. And yet the Conservative leader has herself been charged with a tendency to “doomscroll”.

She does have to limit her own screen time, Badenoch reveals: “I put limits. I have limits on my phone so that I know how much time I’m spending on it.”

She is “very strict” with her children too. “They have to ask for permission before they can go online. So even as I’m doing leader of the opposition stuff, I’m getting messages: ‘Can I have more time on my on my laptop?’.

“I’m still a mum at the end of the day – that doesn’t disappear – and it’s one of the ways I’m able to keep track of what my children are doing. I may not be there physically, but at least remotely I know what they’re doing; what they’re looking at online.”

As well as taking her cues from Haidt, Badenoch tells The House she gets advice from a club of former Tory leaders: “I’m in contact with David Cameron, with William Hague, with IDS,” she confirms, having just come out of a meeting with Iain Duncan Smith in which they discussed opening up a front of attack against Labour on China. Her most recent predecessors Rishi Sunak, Liz Truss, Boris Johnson and Theresa May do not feature in the list.

Previous leaders have had economists and philosophers guiding them: The Constitution of Liberty for Thatcher; The Road to Serfdom for Winston Churchill. Has she any suggested reading for her shadow cabinet, to help ensure they are on the same page?

“I think I’m more likely to give my staff books to read, but not shadow cabinet. The shadow cabinet is very much a team of peers,” Badenoch replies. She is keen to emphasise that she values teamwork.

“Everybody gives their view, then we come out with a collective position. It’s something that I’m trying to demonstrate more of – that this is the sort of leader that I am. I’m very tough. I know my own mind. But I’m not worried about hearing what other people have to say, because that’s how you keep the unity going.”

Although Danny Kruger’s loss was destabilising, and the Tory whips expect further such defections, Badenoch says decidedly: “I will not even allow myself to start worrying about that. Every minute I spend thinking about what other individuals are doing is a minute I’m not spending looking at what the Prime Minister is doing.”

She is frank that opposition involves “a lot of trial and error”, an admission that some things during her tenure haven’t worked, but she claims her learning curve as a positive.

“There is a constant learning of ideas from other people. I like to have input from many others. So, I’m a team person. Our party is not a one-man band,” Badenoch says. The contrast with Nigel Farage’s Reform is left unsaid.

“We need somebody who’s going to be getting to the very best at the time of the election. Not someone who’s peaked on day one. I’m not somebody who peaks on day one.”