The Nigerian woman who became the first black leader of the British opposition

On January 2, 1981, University of Lagos Psychology Prof Feyi Adegoke travelled to South-West London's St Teresa's Maternity Hospital in Wimbledon and gave birth to her first child Olukemi (Kemi) Adegoke. This led to Kemi's acquisition of British citizenship by birth shortly before the United Kingdom’s implementation of the British Nationality Act 1981, which abolished automatic birthright citizenship.

Kemi is a descendant of an academic family. Her father, Femi Adegoke, was a general practitioner with medical practice in Lagos. Her cousin, Yemi Osinbajo, served as Attorney General of Lagos state and as vice president of Nigeria from 1999 to 2007 under President Olesegun Obasanjo.

Kemi spent most of her childhood in the International School of Lagos and the middle-class Lagos precinct of Surulere. During her childhood, Nigeria was under the autocratic leadership of Muhammadu Buhari and military regimes of Ibrahim Babangida and Sani Abacha that devalued Nigeria's Naira currency and ruined the country’s economy.

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Kemi's biography, Blue Ambition: The Unauthorised Biography of Kemi Badenoch authored by Michael Ashcroft, articulates how her middle class childhood in Surulere was compounded by poverty. Her parents’ home had no tap water and electricity and they endured spells of impoverished cycles. Her father lost most of his medical contracts and the family sheltered under her mother’s income.

To salvage his daughter’s propensity to success and avert the deficiencies of hyper-inflation and monetary deterioration, Femi bought Kemi an air ticket through his measly savings and handed her an extra £100 before sending her to London at the age of 16. Her foreign acclimatisation was reinforced by the citizenship she had acquired at birth. She stayed with her mother’s acquaintance.

Kemi would clean toilets and flip burgers while working at McDonald's, as she completed her A-Levels at Phoenix College in Morden, South-West London. She praises the University of Sussex, where she studied computer systems engineering and completed her master's in engineering in 2003, with galvanising her conservative mentality and opening doors to her storied career.

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She was subsequently employed by Royal Bank of Scotland and deployed as a systems analyst before she was appointed as an associate director. British bank Coutts poached her as its wealth manager before she became director of the digital department of British weekly magazine, The Spectator. Kemi's intellectual capacity led to her rise to the position of Chartered Member of the British Computer Society. Her unparalleled reign in the British political stratosphere gradually began in 2005. She had a passion for solving problems and registered as a member of the Conservative Party in 2010, while studying law at the Birkbeck University of London.

In 2012 after becoming a barrister, she wedded acclaimed investment banker and software engineer Hamish Badenoch. Her emotional engagements with the political class commenced when she repeatedly ran for a seat in the Greater London Assembly for every consecutive year until 2015, when she eventually won.

Only 0.2 per cent of the British electorate is black, a daunting prospect that Kemi knew about in 2017 when she vied for Member of Parliament of Saffron Walden, the jewel of Essex. Her opponent and political adversary was Stephen Parkinson, a popular Cambridge educated white male and personal adviser to the then British Prime Minister Theresa May.

Kemi accredited her Yoruba heritage with infusing her dominant personality, including the confidence she displayed during her campaign in Essex for MP, eventually propelling her to victory over Parkinson.

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On July 19, 2017, she walked into Westminster Abbey to take her esteemed seat in the House of Commons, the UK's lower parliamentary legislature. Her enthusiasm wasn't diminished by the glaring bigoted profiling and recurrent subtle racial slurs. Her dominant voice was the antithesis to the systemic prejudice in the House for centuries. She shaped her path as a combative, straight-shooting controversial rightist politician, who refused to abide by the filtering process of left-leaning Conservative Party members. She denounced the Woke Movement, admonished identity politics and lashed out at Labour Party vocalists.

Kemi became the darling of the Conservative Party and on February 13, 2020, she was appointed as Exchequer Secretary, a position she held until September 15, 2021, when she was appointed as Minister of State at the Department of Levelling Up, Housing and Communities. She served while dispensing her responsibility as Minister for Women and Equalities. On February 7, 2023, she became the Secretary of State for the Department of Business and Trade.

Kemi's positive momentum led to her trailblazing victory over Robert Jenrick in a contest to succeed former Prime Minister Rishi Sunak as leader of the Conservative Party on November 2, 2024. She became the first black woman to be appointed the official leader of the British opposition, hence the first black leader of any major British political party and only the fourth female leader to preside over the Conservative Party after Margaret Thatcher, Theresa May and Liz Truss.

The writer is a novelist, Big Brother Africa 2 Kenyan representative and founder of Jeff's Fitness Centre (@jeffbigbrother).