Kemi Badenoch has just settled into an armchair in the snooker room at Rickmansworth Conservative Club after an afternoon of meeting farmers and canvassing voters. As she reaches for a mug of tea, she reflects on her first fortnight as Leader of the Opposition, and says the last thing I was expecting to hear.
“I’m enjoying it, which I’m surprised by,” she says.
Badenoch has a habit of saying exactly what she is thinking, rather than giving what might be termed a “politician’s answer”, and while it has earned her a share of criticism – usually from the Left – it also makes her stand out from a somewhat bland crowd in Westminster.
This is the first newspaper interview she has given since making history as the first black leader of a major UK political party.
Her mission, of course, is to beat Labour at the next election, and she is certain she can get the job done, because they have already proved that “they don’t understand things”, not least farming, business and wealth creation.
Dressed in a snug-fitting Barbour jacket after visiting an arable farm in Buckinghamshire, Badenoch is on the warpath, fired up by first-hand stories of how Rachel Reeves’s Budget will kill off family farms.
Third, fourth and fifth-generation farmers had joined her in a grain store at Upper Pepperhill Farm near Aylesbury to explain how a 20 per cent inheritance tax once every generation would kill businesses that operate on profit margins of less than 1 per cent.
“Sitting with the farmers, the overwhelming sense for me was guilt that we let these people [Labour] in,” she says. “There’s a lot that needs doing, but we have just got to start fixing things, and we can’t do that unless we get back in, because Labour don’t understand what life is like and how stuff works.
“A lot of people will say that they’re dishonest, that they’re liars, but I actually just think that they say things that they don’t understand.”
Removing the inheritance tax exemption from farms is a case in point, she says, because the Government thinks they are just “moving things from one ledger to another”, but the result will be farming families selling up “and the knowledge that has been handed down through generations will disappear”. The changes will lead to a permanently changed countryside, covered over with Ed Miliband’s beloved solar farms, and even more reliance on food imports.
Badenoch fears that Reeves will not reverse the policy “because they will want to save face”, and what’s worse, “she’s going to be coming back for more”.
Labour’s numbers don’t add up, she says, and with no serious growth projected, businesses will close, the tax base will shrink and taxes will go up again to fill the gap.
“All of her bad decisions are going to impact my life, the lives of all of your readers. I don’t want Labour to fail, because it’s going to be bad for all of us.”
Reinstating agricultural property relief for inheritance tax is one of the few nailed-down policies that Badenoch has so far announced, along with scrapping VAT on private school fees.
“I could tell when they announced that Budget that most of them had never run a business before, had never had to employ anyone,” says Badenoch, who worked as an associate director at Coutts, the private bank, before becoming an MP in 2017.
“I’ve had to employ people, and I know what National Insurance does to the cost of a job, and it does make you think differently.
“If you watch the Budget, when they announced the [increase in] employer’s National Insurance contributions, there was a sharp intake of breath on the Tory benches. We all went, ‘What?’
“And you looked across, and the Labour people were all grinning. They were grinning because they didn’t understand. They just thought, ‘Yeah, greedy businessman, we’re going to take some of the money’. And I thought, ‘They don’t understand’.”
What they didn’t understand, she says, is that charities, GPs, nurseries, universities, councils, care homes and so many more employers would be hit by the jobs tax, and that top-up payments for childcare costs, for example, “are all wiped out” by prices going up.
“I’ve never seen a Budget like this before where they’ve managed to upset every single group you can imagine, and the only people who seem to be happy are the unions,” she says.
The Budget may well have done Badenoch a favour. She admits that in recent years “we have not shown the difference” between Conservative and Labour, meaning that “people think that we’re, you know, the same. It’s just different faces”. But the Government’s badly judged Budget is already giving Badenoch a chance to show where the big divides are. “Authentic conservatism is coming back, values-based conservatism, not micro-policy or managerialism. We are very, very different,” she says. “And I want people to know that.”
Badenoch herself is certainly different. The fact that it is the Conservatives who have elected the first black leader of a major party (and their fourth woman) while Labour remain wedded to middle-aged white men from north London has so irked some on the Left that they cannot contain their anger.
Dawn Butler, the Labour MP for Brent East, shared a tweet which said Badenoch represented “white supremacy in blackface”.
“If a white person had those views,” Badenoch says, “they’d probably be in prison, or would be receiving calls from the police in a way that other people are having for tweets.
“I also think that it comes from a place of jealousy, that we have been able to do something which they and the so-called progressive party have never been able to do.”
Does she have a theory for why that is the case?
“A core Conservative principle is competition,” she says. “We believe in free and fair competition. So all of us compete. We compete for selections, and if you get somewhere, it’s because you are the best. Labour thinks that everybody needs help. So they will create all-women shortlists, and they’ll create all-black shortlists. And what tends to happen is that the kind of woman who wins from an all-women shortlist is different from the kind of woman who would have beaten the guys. The kind of woman who’s beaten the guys is more likely to become a leader than someone who had all the men removed from the competition before they could win.”
Butler’s reaction to her victory, she says, also shows that prejudice over the colour of someone’s skin is not limited to white people responding to ethnic minorities. People like Butler, she says, need to “stop bringing race into everything”, because “the colour of my skin is not the thing that I think is interesting. It is what I am saying. And if people are too focused on what I look like, what my gender is, they’re not listening to what I’m saying”.
Badenoch’s mention of the police visiting people because of their tweets is a reference to one of her constituents – Telegraph columnist Allison Pearson – being put under investigation over a social media post. “We shouldn’t have journalists getting visited by the police for expressing opinions,” she states.
She believes Sir Keir Starmer needs to review the laws around so-called non-crime hate incidents, and show that he truly believes in free speech, as he often claims he does.
“We need to stop this behaviour of people wasting police time on trivial incidents because they don’t like something, as if they’re in a nursery,” she adds. “It’s like children reporting each other. And I think that in certain cases, the police do it because they’re afraid that if they don’t do it, they will also be accused of not taking these issues seriously. So I don’t like criticising the everyday police who are carrying these things out. I know some of them have got the wrong ideas. It is about what message the leadership is sending.”
Badenoch and her husband, Hamish, a banker at Deutsche Bank and a former Tory councillor in Merton, south-west London, have three children, daughters aged 11 and five and a son aged eight. When I ask how they responded to her being elected leader, she pulls out her mobile phone and shows me a video, taken by a relative, of the children watching the television news as the result was announced on November 2.
Her elder daughter holds her hands aloft when she realises her mother has won and hugs her brother, while her younger daughter sits at a table looking largely uninterested.
“Yeah, they are pleased,” Badenoch says. “My eight-year-old is very curious about it. The 11-year-old gets it, and I told her, you know, play it down at school. People know, because the surname is fairly unique, and trying to get her to just understand what that might mean and how to behave. My eight-year-old is sort of just understanding politics.”
Are they proud of the fact that she has achieved something no other black woman has?
“No. All of that escapes them; all they see is Mummy’s on TV. So they’re very proud of that. But I haven’t brought my children up to feel like there’s disadvantage out there. I want them to know that life is tough.
“The thing that I’m most worried about is that my children will grow up soft, which was not a luxury that I had [during her childhood in Nigeria]; they don’t know what it’s like to not have stuff, and that worries me.”
Badenoch was born in the UK but lived in Nigeria until returning to Britain at 16. Her father, Femi, who died in 2022, was a GP, while her mother, Feyi, was a professor of physiology at the University of Lagos.
“If you teach children to be race-conscious they’re going to grow up thinking that everything that’s happening to them is because of that, and it doesn’t mean that the prejudice doesn’t exist, but that’s not how I’m bringing up my children. There are going to be problems no matter who you are, where you come from, and you’ve just got to make sure that you have the resilience to be able to survive that.”
Before she was elected as leader, Badenoch told The Telegraph she would be Sir Keir’s “worst nightmare” because he and his party would not know how to handle her, and the early evidence suggests she is right.
She has been besting Sir Keir at Prime Minister’s Questions, and the Prime Minister has the unfortunate trait of looking patronising when he is trying to belittle the new Leader of the Opposition.
“He can be as patronising as he likes,” she smiles, “but I don’t think he can mansplain anything to me, because he doesn’t know what’s going on.
“He is also quite cowardly, because he relies on his back benches to attack me when I can’t respond, because I can only speak when I am questioning him.
“I am not afraid. I won’t get everything right. I’m not perfect, but I know why I’m doing this job. It’s not about me. It’s about all those people out there, like the farmers, who need someone to speak up for them. I don’t know who [Sir Keir] is speaking up for. It’s basically bureaucrats and unions. Those are his people.”
Which brings us back to why Badenoch thought she might not enjoy her new job.
“Well, I thought that I would hate Prime Minister’s Questions,” she explains, “because I like answering questions, it’s the thing that I do best, and I thought, I’m just going to have to ask questions.
“But actually, you can make the Prime Minister talk about what you want to talk about, so I’m enjoying being able to control the conversation, even if it’s just for 10 minutes a week.”
Many people noticed that her hand seemed to be shaking as she picked up a glass of water at her first PMQs, which they interpreted as a sign of nerves. But she insists she has always had shaky hands, and offers up her left hand to demonstrate.
“When I was a child I was a terrible brownie,” she says, “because I couldn’t thread the needle.”
She enjoyed choosing her shadow cabinet and tried to make sure her appointees were happy by asking them which jobs they wanted to do and offering them more than one choice of role.
Her closest rival for the leadership, Robert Jenrick, was made shadow justice secretary. Was he happy to be offered that?
“It was one of the options that he gave me, so I hope so. I wanted him to do something I knew he’d be interested in, and he talked a lot in his campaign about the European Convention on Human Rights. We do share a belief that the ECHR is a problem. What I wasn’t doing was committing to leaving it, but that gives him a space to be able to actually deep dive into that issue.”
She has talked about the need to end the drama and the in-fighting, as every new Conservative leader does, but the stakes have never been higher for an incoming Tory leader, given the scale of this year’s general election defeat and the multiple threats posed by Labour, Reform UK and the Lib Dems.
Many Tories believe that the biggest obstacle to re-election is Reform, rather than Labour, given the common refrain among voters that they are sick of both the main parties.
Badenoch refuses to rank any one party as a bigger threat than any other, partly because all three are strong in some constituencies and weak in others, so her philosophy, borrowed from her business background, is that “you do well when you have the best product”.
County council elections in May will come around far quicker than Badenoch might like, given that she will be judged on what progress has been made by then. Her strategy is to concentrate on cutting waste and showing that Tory councils are more careful with taxpayers’ money, rather than talking about national issues.
Labour, she says, “just want to pretend it’s still 1997 and they can spend and splurge”, while Reform “has got about 20 years of learning before they get to where we are”.
Nigel Farage, she says, likes to talk up Reform’s growing membership, but “ours is going up a lot more than that” – she claims her party has seen an increase of more than 3,000 members since she became leader, including 600 lapsed members who rejoined on the day of our interview after she sent out an email asking for their support.
At the national level, Alex Burghart, the shadow chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, has been given the job of developing policies, with a broad brief to “rewire the state so we can grow the economy”.
She ran for the party leadership on the basis that policies would be developed over time, and that they would be the right policies for wherever Britain is in five years’ time, rather than now. David Cameron, she points out, found that the policies he developed in 2007 were not the policies he needed in 2010, because there had been a financial crash by then.
Badenoch was elected Conservative leader three days before Donald Trump was re-elected US President, and she says she is in touch with JD Vance, the vice-president elect, and sees opportunities to build on the links the Tories have with the Republicans.
“I’ve never met Donald Trump, but now that he has won, I think that there are opportunities for us to build on the links that we have with the Republican Party… I think that this could be a very exciting time for the UK.”
Trying to make sure a Trump presidency is good for Britain is part of the job of an effective Opposition, she says, given Sir Keir’s natural antipathy towards Trump.
She wants to encourage “real-world” business people and entrepreneurs to help make the case for a trade deal with the US, to take the politics out of the argument, because Britain needs a trade deal “if we want our economy to boom”.
As she prepares to leave, Badenoch has one last message for Telegraph readers.
“I don’t want people to think I’m being complacent,” she says. “We know that there is a long journey ahead of us. We know we need to show contrition for the mistakes we made, and that’s what’s going to happen under my leadership. But we are not cowed. We may be outnumbered, we are not outgunned, and we can take the fight to this Labour Government, because they don’t know what they’re doing.”
