Kemi’s Comeback

Olukemi Olufunto Adegoke “Kemi” Badenoch has been the leader of the UK Conservative Party since November 2024. Just consider that for a moment. 

A political party that too many elements of the progressive establishment still insist is synonymous with xenophobia and racism is now led by a capable black woman who says she is “to all intents and purposes a first-generation immigrant.” She is the progressives’worst nightmare.

Badenoch was actually born in Wimbledon, London, in January 1980. But that was only because her mother, Feyi Adubifa, a professor of physiology at the University of Lagos in Nigeria, had travelled briefly to London to give birth at St. Teresa’s Maternity Hospital because she had gynecological problems. This made Kemi unknowingly a British citizen, though she didn’t realize she was eligible for a British passport until she was a teenager.

She returned to the UK from Nigeria at 16 and went on to study computer systems engineering at Sussex University. Badenoch joined the Conservatives in 2005 and became MP for Saffron Walden in 2017. She served as Business and Equalities secretary under the last Conservative prime minister, Rishi Sunak.

She says it was “the soft bigotry of low expectations” that led her to conservatism. And there was no shortage of low expectations after she became leader of the party after the Conservatives’ disastrous 2024 general election. As recently as at the 2025 Conservative conference, she was being written off as a dud by media commentators and Tory insiders.

The former Conservative senior adviser, Dominic Cummings, called her “lazy, brittle and delusional” and warned that the Conservative Party faced extinction under her leadership. Her personal ratings were almost as bad as those of Liz Truss, the Conservative prime minister who lasted only 49 days in office in 2022. 

Badenoch was regarded as abrasive, shallow, inexperienced, and generally not up to the job. After the Conservatives were routed in the May 2025 local elections, commentators began forecasting her and her party’s imminent demise. Nigel Farage’s Reform UK seemed to have eclipsed the Conservatives as the leading party of the political right and was dominating the opinion polls.

But what a difference a year makes. 

In the latest polls, the Conservatives have edged ahead of Reform. Badenoch’s personal ratings have improved by 20 points. She is now being celebrated by some as the most combative Conservative leader since Margaret Thatcher.

Badenoch’s revival can usefully be traced to November 2025 and her brutal reply to the then Labour Chancellor, Rachel Reeves’s Budget in the House of Commons. Reeves had claimed that criticism of her conduct of the Treasury was motivated by misogyny.

“Let me explain to the chancellor, woman to woman,” she said, eyeballing the chancellor over the Dispatch Box, “people are not complaining because she is female; they are complaining because she is utterly incompetent.” When the prime minister, Keir Starmer, then appeared to exchange words with Reeves, Badenoch said with mock concern, “Aw. Is he mansplaining you? Do you want help?” This is not the way feminists are supposed to behave, especially black feminists.

Reeves lost her job when Andy Burnham took over as Labour prime minister from  Starmer in July 2026. Badenoch is also being credited as having played a major role in the downfall of Starmer by exposing his woodenness and penchant for policy U-turns.  

It’s too early to say that Badenoch has seen off the challenge from Reform. But  her reviews are now nothing short of sensational.

The respected historian Niall Ferguson calls her the “Black Thatcher” and says she will be the next prime minister. The Times commentator Fraser Nelson calls her “absolutely electrifying” and the first “true Conservative” in decades. Even the rapper Nicki Minaj has declared herself a fan. 

Conservatives appreciate Badenoch not just for her knock-‘em-down style of politics but because she defends traditional values of sound money, hard work, low taxation and reduced borrowing. She is not just a populist opponent of illegal immigration, though she insists that she would stop the boats. 

She is not ashamed to give tax breaks to the wealthy. At the Conservative Party Conference this month, she promised to abolish inheritance tax on family homes, whatever their value, if the Conservatives won the next election. She is not afraid of praising businessmen for creating jobs and being essential for economic growth.  This is not the progressive “BBC” view. 

It might seem strange that the party of Churchill and Thatcher ever departed from these values. Yet under successive Tory prime ministers after 2010, taxation was allowed to rise to levels unseen in the UK since the 1950s. Under post-Brexit policies introduced by Boris Johnson, net immigration rose to nearly one million a year.

The Labour Prime Minister Andy Burnham is not wrong in claiming that the foundations of the UK’s crippling debt pile were built by the Conservatives in the decade before 2024. The relentless rise in welfare costs (one in ten Britons now receive sickness and disability benefits) also began under the Tory watch.

So Badenoch has a job to do distancing herself from the legacy of previous Tory administrations, of which she was a member, and persuading a sceptical UK that the Conservatives can be a responsible party of government. It will take more than a few good performances at Prime Minister’s Question Time in the Commons to persuade the country of that.

But Badenoch has certainly asserted her authority over her party. She has made clear that candidates for election must subscribe to her values and policies. These include a commitment to leave the European Convention on Human Rights, which right-wingers blame for Britain’s inability to deport illegal migrants.

Badenoch has departed from recent Tory administrations, such as Boris Johnson’s, in revoking the commitment to deliver net zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050. She wants drilling to resume in the North Sea to reduce energy costs.

But it is perhaps in the so-called culture wars that Kemi Badenoch has marked out uncompromising new Tory territory. She wants to replace multiculturalism in schools, overhaul the Equality Act, and prioritise meritocracy. This black politician is committed to ending identity politics and promises to prohibit public bodies, like the NHS, from imposing DEI diversity quotas for hiring and promotions.

The Tory leader has used her race and gender in a very different way than that expected of minorities rejecting the tired dogmas of “structural” racism and misogyny. “Women are women and men are men,” she says, “you cannot change your biological sex.” She says doesn’t play the race card, yet no one could call her a “coconut.” No one would dare. She doesn’t suffer fools, especially progressive ones. The left has had difficulty coping with Badenoch precisely because she doesn’t conform. Black people and women are supposed to be victims. Whatever else she is, Olukemi Olufunto Adegoke Badenoch is nobody’s victim.