The Tory leader has been useful for her party extremists who want to lurch even further to the right – and she’s been at it again
Here’s a prediction for you. Kemi Badenoch will not be leader of the Conservative Party by the next general election.
She looks to have served her purpose, weaponising her skin colour to prevent critics of her xenophobic right-wing policies from coming for her.
She has been useful for the Tory extremists who want to lurch even further to the right.
And Kemi has been at it again, claiming on Monday at a right-wing summit in London that policies designed to give everyone a fair crack of the whip in society are “poison”.
But, as my colleague Lizzy Buchan pointed out in her column on Monday, the knives are out for Badenoch within her own party. It would now appear to be a matter of time.
Olukemi Olufunto Adegoke Badenoch – her full name – has nothing in the tank beyond bile and vitriol for the immigrants who came to this country to escape hardship. As she did.
She was born in Wimbledon in 1980 after her mother travelled from Nigeria to give birth in a private hospital. Kemi returned to Nigeria soon after.
The following year, the British Nationality Act later abolished automatic birthright citizenship. Badenoch came to the UK at 16 to live with a friend of her mum due to the deepening political and economic climate in Nigeria.
Populism and a willingness to be used as a front for xenophobia has worked for her thus far. But whisperings behind the scenes would appear to suggest her dire Prime Minister’s Questions performances have seen the hour glass upturned on her tenure.
The mutter from the gutter that is the Tory right wing is her first 100 days have been underwhelming to say the least. A recent YouGov poll said 14% of respondents believe Olukemi looks like a future PM, while not many more, 26%, reckon she is capable enough to be in No.10 now.
A poor performance in May’s local elections could see the trapdoor open up underneath her. Just as it did when Rishi Sunak (who mocked his own skin colour on the campaign trail) was blitzed at last year’s general election. He’d done exactly as Badenoch is doing, prostrating himself to the racists and xenophobes on the Tory fringes.
It is hard to know when politicians of colour like the two of them will learn that they will never be viewed by the extremists in the way that they would like to be seen.
There’s a scene at the end of the 1983 movie Trading Places where two of the main characters, brothers and company owners Randolph and Mortimer Duke, are in a work restroom discussing their employee Billy Ray Valentine – played by Eddie Murphy – as he hides in a toilet cubicle listening.
Believing they are alone, Randolph asks Mortimer whether he really believes he would put someone who looks like Murphy in charge of the family business.
“No,” says Mortimer, “Neither would I.”
That scene came to mind last year when Reform leader Nigel Farage claimed Sunak – after all he’d done to endear himself to the extremists – “doesn’t understand our culture” after Sunak had left the D-Day commemorations in France early.
Badenoch would do well to read the tea leaves Stateside where Donald Trump’s “merit-based” politics basically dictate that the default standard for competency in his world is white and male. The coming months are shaping up to be brutal.
