Kemi Badenoch is too busy pulling up the ladder to give diversity even a minute’s thought, says columnist Darren Lewis. And when the Tories have no use for her, they’ll cast her aside like Priti, Suella, Kwasi and so many others
If Kemi Badenoch scrapes home in the backstabbing race to become the next Conservative party leader, they’ll be at it again.
The delusionists and the indignant will have you see it as a triumph for diversity – when the truth is, she’d be nowhere near the top table had she not been willing to demonise and vilify immigrants and people of colour.
The other truth is that if she were to win, the only people toasting her success as a triumph for racial diversity will be those who have very little racial diversity around them or in their own workplaces. People who don’t want to explore the issue constructively will throw out that snide “wrong kind of Black person” retort that will tell you so much about them.
They’ll ignore the truth that a triumph for diversity is when someone is in a position to give hope on an issue around which there had previously been none. Neither Badenoch nor even James Cleverly – before his knifing in the leadership race – even remotely provide that.
Badenoch is too busy pulling up the ladder to give diversity even a minute’s thought. She is cover for the Conservative far right politicians who feel better about language the rest of us see as racism because she doesn’t have a problem with it.
Olukemi Adegoke, to give her her full birth name, is that walking contradiction of the person who grew up abroad but claims others entering this country do not share “British values” (it’s always entertaining to ask her and her leadership rival Robert Jenrick what British values are – then watch them squirm).
As the Conservatives lurch even further to the right with a leadership race between two of the oddest of balls, the one thing we can be grateful for is that they remain totally unelectable for the foreseeable future.
Ordinary people reject their hate, the lies, their self-interest, their lunacy that we should abandon all our rights (by leaving the European Convention on Human Rights) because someone else has theirs protected.
Badenoch, a mother herself, insults mums up and down the country by insisting they get too much maternity pay. She and Jenrick aim to worry parts of the country into rejecting so many of the rights hard won after years of exploitation in society and in the workplace.
Badenoch and Jenrick also, unsurprisingly, are against the workers rights designed to end the gig economy, zero hours contracts and casual labour rates.
So how exactly would Badenoch assuming control represent a triumph for diversity? Which child, seeing their parents suffer from the withdrawal of rights to which they are entitled, would see her as a beacon of hope?
Don’t try to sell me the “at least she’s there” line. She wouldn’t be if the Tory right were prepared to do the racists’ and xenophobes’ dirty work themselves.
And eventually, when there is no more use for her, they’ll cast her aside. Just like they did with Priti Patel, Suella Braverman, Kwasi Kwarteng and so many others.
All they’ve done is help to revive a culture within which those who wish to divide us can spout their hate with their chests.
Trouble is, you’ll also get Tory party members like “Jerry” who, two years ago, called up radio station LBC to insist the then-Prime Minister Rishi Sunak – who had prostrated himself to the extent that he made jokes about his own skin colour and pushed the Rwanda plan – “isn’t even British most in people’s opinion”.
Sunak and his colleagues of colour are, and continue to be, simply useful for the Tories as they continue to lurch to the right.
So good luck to Kemi and the Conservatives, which makes them sound like a terrible tribute band because, well… that’s what they are right now.
