Political reporter
Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch has told the BBC how she stood up in an exam and accused a fellow pupil of cheating, leading to him being expelled from school.
In a wide-ranging interview with Amol Rajan, the Tory leader speaks about how her childhood in Nigeria shaped her politics and character.
Speaking about her hatred of rule-breakers, she said she was “about 14 or 15” when she stood up in an exam and said “‘he’s cheating, he’s the one that’s doing it’, and that boy ended up getting expelled”.
She added: “I didn’t get praised for it. I was a relatively popular kid at school, and people said ‘why did you do that, why would you do it?’
“I said ‘because he was doing the wrong thing’.”
Elsewhere in the interview, she talks about how she lost her faith in God but still considers herself a “cultural Christian” and about the lack of ambition some teachers in the UK had for black children in the 1990s.
Badenoch was born in London in 1980, but grew up in Nigeria and the US, where her mother lectured.
She returned to the UK when she was 16 to live with a family friend because of the worsening political and economic situation in Nigeria and, she tells Rajan, because she “really, really” wanted to be in London.
Last week, she said she no longer identified as Nigerian – a comment that elicited a strong reaction in Nigeria, with a number of political figures accusing her of continually portraying the country in bad light.
Badenoch studied for her A-levels at a college in south London while working in a McDonald’s restaurant and elsewhere.
In her interview, she speaks about the “poverty of low expectations” she says she encountered at college in London, when she says black children were steered towards vocational qualifications rather than A-Levels, and discouraged from applying for Oxford and Cambridge.
Badenoch stresses that it was not all of her teachers who displayed these attitudes and she did not think they were being racist, but that they “thought they were being helpful” by lowering expectations.
The BBC has spoken to the principal of Badenoch’s college at the time, who said the college was “trying to do the best for every individual student, regardless of their background” and the Tory leader’s comment on low expectations “just sounds like rhetoric to reinforce her political narrative”.
When this was put to her by Rajan, Badenoch insisted it was not just political rhetoric, and that “if people deny that these things happen, we’re never going to fix it”.
She argued that it was not just an issue for black children, adding: “A lot of white working class kids have this problem where the teachers say, ‘well, you come from the sort of family where nobody really wants to do anything. We’re not going to push you. It’s too hard. It is not worth it.’
“That is not right.”
‘I rejected God’
Badenoch completed a degree in computer engineering at Sussex University and worked in finance and IT before entering politics. She married banker Hamish Badenoch in 2012, and they have three children.
In her BBC interview, she speaks about how proud her GP father, Femi Adegoke, was of her when she became an MP in 2017.
When he was dying of a brain tumour in 2022, Badenoch says: “He cried because he knew he was dying and he said, ‘I know that you’re going to go all the way, and I know I’m not going to be there to see it’. And that was really sad.”
She also speaks about losing her faith in God after watching coverage of the arrest of Austrian man Josef Fritzl, who kept his daughter captive for 24 years in a dungeon he built beneath his home.
Badenoch, whose maternal grandfather was a Methodist minister, said: “I couldn’t stop reading this story. And I read her account, how she prayed every day to be rescued.
“And I thought, I was praying for all sorts of stupid things and I was getting my prayers answered. I was praying to have good grades, my hair should grow longer, and I would pray for the bus to come on time so I wouldn’t miss something.
“It’s like, why were those prayers answered, and not this woman’s prayers? And it was like someone blew out a candle.”
But she added: “I rejected God, not Christianity. So I would still define myself as a cultural Christian.”
Since Badenoch became leader in November last year, the Conservatives have lost control of 10 local authorities to Nigel Farage’s Reform UK, and slumped to third or fourth place in national opinion polls.
She repeated her plea for “patience,” insisting that she knew “the leader of the opposition’s job gets harder before it gets easier”.
“I am somebody who people have always tried to write off, and I have always succeeded, and I believe that I can do that with the Conservative Party”.
Amol Rajan Interviews: Kemi Badenoch, 7pm on Thursday 7th August on BBC2 – and iPlayer
