Many leading politicians like to talk about going on a road trip. But Kemi Badenoch’s journey has been longer and more eventful than most.

From the leafy London suburb of Wimbledon to Nigeria in West Africa and south London, from the University of Sussex, home of socialists, to the rural haven of Saffron Walden in Essex, he hopes his journey will eventually lead him to 10 Downing Street.

This one who battled Boudica along the way Conservative Party He gained a reputation for a combative and at times abrasive, even aggressive style of politics: someone who would cross the road to fight.

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“I’m a very outspoken person,” he admitted on Sky News this week when Sophy Ridge challenged him about that reputation.

“I’m very outspoken and very confident. I’m not a joker.”

Now Conservative Party members have voted to elect him as leader following strong performances in the election and TV debate that showed him rebounding from a gaffe-prone party conference.

He gained momentum at the right time in the three phases of the leadership race. Robert Jenrick was the candidate who gained momentum in the first round of voting by MPs in September.

James Cleverly got it after stealing the show at the conference’s “beauty pageant.” However, momentum appears to be increasing as party members vote. Miss Badenoch.

That didn’t seem to be the case at the conference in Birmingham. clumsily declares maternity pay ‘excessive’ and said some officers were so bad 10 percent should be in prison.

Ironically, given the maternity pay blunder, the mother of three benefited from a row Former Tory MP Sir Christopher Chope, one of Jenrick’s supporters, said: “You can’t spend all your time with your family and still be leader of the opposition.”

From Wimbledon to Nigeria and back again

But Ms Badenoch’s background is literally miles (more than 3,000, in fact) from that of the typical Conservative politician. He spent his early years in Nigeria, arguably described by David Cameron in 2016 as one of the most corrupt countries in the world.

His Nigerian parents, he says, were comfortably middle-class “with a car and a driver.” Father Femi was a general practitioner at his own clinic and his mother, Feyi, was an academic at the medical school of the University of Lagos.

But Miss Badenoch (full name Olukemi Olufunto Adegoke) was born at the private St Teresa’s Hospital in Wimbledon in January 1980, after her parents traveled to England and paid for private healthcare. This meant he had a British passport.

He then lived in Lagos until he was 16, before returning to Wimbledon and taking A levels in maths, biology and chemistry, and living with his mother’s best friend “for a better future” after arriving in the UK with just £100. .

So he says he works part-time at McDonald’s in Wimbledon, cleaning toilets and “flipping burgers”. But he was mocked by Labor MPs last month for saying: “I came into the working class when I was 16 working at McDonald’s.”

The next stage of his journey was the University of Sussex and a computing course. Here he had no time for leftist students, whom he called “stupid leftist white kids”, and later accused Bob Geldof’s 2005 Live 8 benefit concerts of patronizing Africans.

While working in banking, he joined the Conservative Party that year and became an early Cameroonian, despite being a huge fan of Margaret Thatcher.

She was on track to become a member of the London Assembly and came third behind the Liberal Democrats in the 2010 general election, running for Dulwich and West Norwood against Labour’s Tessa Jowell.

Like Mrs Thatcher almost 60 years ago, Kemi met her husband, Cambridge-educated banker and party activist Hamish Badenoch, when he was a parliamentary candidate.

In the 2015 general election he was headteacher of the Catholic state school Ampleforth College, a councilor in Merton, south London, and a Conservative candidate in Foyle in Northern Ireland.

They were both born a year apart at the same hospital in St Teresa, Wimbledon. After university, Hamish worked in Malawi, Nigeria and Kenya before returning to London and Barclays before starting his current job at Deutsche Bank.

Read more about Kemi Badenoch:
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Introduction to politics

But the 2000s saw two potentially embarrassing flaws in Ms Badenoch’s soaring CV. One of these was the widely reported hacking of Harriet Harman’s website, which came to light shortly after she became MP for Saffron Walden in 2017.

These days he treats the incident as relatively unimportant. “It was a speeding ticket back then, the same speeding ticket,” he told Sophy Ridge this week. “It was actually something quite different from the current law.

“And this was something that happened ten years before I became an MP. It was a lot of fun back then. “It’s a lot less fun now that I’m an MP.”

The other, described in Blue Ambition, Lord Ashcroft’s biography, involved a near-fight with a member of the public at Oxford Town Hall during a Conservative party event in 2006.

Following an argument between the two, the woman slapped Ms Badenoch and then ran away. Ms Badenoch then chased her up the stairs, grabbed her by the hair and pulled her back, then let go and she ran out of the town hall.

Recalling the incident years later, he said: “I never saw him again, thank God.”

After entering parliament in the safe seat of what is now North West Essex, Brexiteer Badenoch’s rise up the ministerial ladder has been rapid: party deputy leader, children and families, international trade, Treasury, equalities and local government, before joining Liz Truss’s cabinet. Under Rishi Sunak.

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He backed Michael Gove, seen by MPs as his long-term mentor, in the 2019 Conservative Party leadership contest. Then in 2022, he himself became fourth after resigning along with many other ministers, triggering Boris Johnson’s downfall. But he made a sign.

As a cabinet minister who also tackles business and equality issues, he has been at odds with his rivals, some Conservatives and even Dr. He lived up to his reputation as an outspoken – critics might call vulgar – political debater, with some heated clashes with the Who.

His handling of the Post Office Horizon scandal was fiercely criticized after he controversially sacked Post Office chief Henry Staunton, who claimed he had been told to “stop” compensation payments, and subsequently quarreled publicly with him.

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One of his most vocal arguments came with former Doctor Who star David Tennant at the British LGBT awards, after he said: “Until we wake up and Kemi Badenoch no longer exists – I don’t want her evil. I just wish she would shut up.”

She responded to

She was also rebuked by Caroline Nokes, then chair of the equality committee and now – ominously for Ms Badenoch – deputy speaker of the House of Commons.

During a fractious and raucous debate at Ms Nokes’s committee hearing, Ms Badenoch accused left-wing Labor MP Kate Osborne of lying about trans issues.

Last year, instead of giving MPs a full House of Commons statement, he infuriated the Speaker of the House of Commons, Sir Lindsay Hoyle, by issuing a written statement about repealing EU laws after Brexit.

After telling the speaker he was sorry the timing of the announcement was “not to your satisfaction”, Sir Lindsay shouted at him: “Who do you think you are talking to?”

Conflicts like this in her long political journey have led to claims that Ms Badenoch could start a fight in an empty room.

After all, he is an aggressive, confrontational, anti-woke warrior who takes no prisoners. And that’s what his supporters say!

Sir Keir Starmer, be careful.