LORD ASHCROFT: Lefty Sussex University is where Kemi Badenoch got a taste for the politics that would inspire her to become a Tory MP, minister and contender for party leadership.
Lefty Sussex University is where Kemi Badenoch got a taste for the politics that would inspire her to become a Tory MP, a Cabinet minister and now a contender for the leadership of the Conservative Party.
'For political reasons, Left-wing students were pressing for a ban on Coca-Cola and on the Daily Mail. She thought they were middle class and spoiled and didn't understand the real world.' Kemi was born in 1980 in a private maternity hospital in Wimbledon, south-west London, after her Nigerian parents — father Femi Adegoke and mother Feyi — were given what she describes as 'an obstetric referral' to a Harley Street doctor after difficulties conceiving.
Her English-speaking parents belonged to the Yoruba people, a West African ethnic group that makes up about a fifth of the population of Nigeria. Her father was a doctor with a thriving private clinic, her mother a professor of medical physiology. They were middle class and comfortably off. 'Dad spent several months' pay on my plane ticket,' she recalled in a 2017 Daily Mail interview. 'We went to the travel agent with all his savings stuffed in a plastic carrier bag. He had £100 left when he'd paid for my ticket, and he gave it to me to take to England. So that's all I had when I arrived.'
'A lot of damage has been done by accepting this kind of behaviour as the inevitable corollary of deprivation and poverty.' The generally favourable circumstances she encountered have surely informed her politics and her love for Britain. In one interview with the Daily Mail, Kemi said she thought it was 'a very special privilege to be a citizen of this country. Its values make it special'.
After graduating in 2003, Kemi worked as a software engineer at IT services company Logica. She had, as we saw earlier, challenged the Lefty do-gooders who dominated campus politics but now she took aim at a much bigger fish when in 2005 the singer and political activist Bob Geldof announced a follow-up to his ground-breaking 1985 Live Aid charity concert.
Senegalese singer Baaba Maal said: 'I feel it's very patronising as an African artist that more of us aren't involved.' Convinced that African people had been forced to assume second-class status in every aspect of Live 8, she decided to go into politics. Aged 25, she joined the party with which she felt most naturally aligned: the Conservatives.
Kemi went to speak to her afterwards, introducing herself as a member of the Conservative Party. The woman stared back in disbelief and then lambasted her for being a Tory, before suggesting that she was too wealthy and too immature to understand the world. As a black woman, she continued to reject the very concept of positive discrimination, challenging what she saw as the lazy pigeonholing of black people by those on the Left.
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