Kemi Badenoch, the latest entrant to an increasingly crowded race to succeed Boris Johnson, has marked her brief time in parliament by the relative speed of her ascent and a willingness to embrace controversy and conflict over culture war issues. Elected to the safe Essex seat of Saffron Walden in 2017, Badenoch took just two years to join the frontbenches and was, until her resignation this week, a joint minister for levelling up and equalities. Last year Badenoch, a former junior education minister, was even briefly tipped to succeed Gavin Williamson as education secretary, although in the end she was reshuffled to another second-tier role. Badenoch’s pitch to Tory MPs places her very much on the right of the party, where she risks seeking support from a similar ideological pool to Suella Braverman, the attorney general, who entered the race on Wednesday. Announcing her decision to run with an article in the Times, Badenoch condemned what she termed “platitudes and empty rhetoric”, offering a somewhat vague pledge of smaller government and lower taxes, plus an iron-clad commitment to Brexit. Much of the article was devoted to a condemnation of identity politics and “social justice”, particularly that based around race and culture, a common theme of Badenoch’s political discourse. The 42-year-old former banker, who grew up in the UK, US and Nigeria, has faced previous criticism for her overtly trenchant views on culture war issues, notably her belief that racial disparities are often overplayed and not structural, and are exploited for division by those on the left. Last year some academics condemned Badenoch when she accused schools of teaching white privilege as an uncontested fact, saying this was breaking the law. Badenoch said she did not want white children being taught about “their inherited racial guilt”.
Known as hardworking and committed, Badenoch is popular with some Conservative MPs but openly disliked by others, due to her robust views and a personal style that some say can be abrasive. Last year she faced calls to apologise or be sacked after responding to a journalist’s routine request for comment about a Covid vaccines video by tweeting the reporter’s name and questions, accusing her of inventing claims, and calling her behaviour “creepy and bizarre”. The journalist, Nadine White, then of the Huffpost website, received a significant amount of abuse following the tweets.