If, as reported, Kemi Badenoch is to replace Gavin Williamson as education secretary at the next cabinet reshuffle, it appears there is only a remote chance of her keeping the department quietly ticking over after a disruptive and harrowing period. While Boris Johnson will be hoping she avoids Williamson’s numerous gaffes, Badenoch has shown no inclination to shy away from controversy during her brief time in parliament and as a relatively junior minister. More than one person told the Guardian she would “cross the road to pick a fight”. However, it has been her determination to take on critics of Britain’s – and the government’s – record on race as a black woman that has won her the ear of the prime minister on the issue. Badenoch only entered parliament at the 2017 general election as MP for Saffron Walden, in Essex. She became a parliamentary secretary at the Department for Education in July 2019 before becoming minister for equalities and a Treasury minister in February last year. Her influence has been most felt in the former role, when she was at the forefront of the government’s attempts to stave off claims of racial inequality in the wake of the Black Lives Matter (BLM) protests and disparity in Covid deaths. The Times reports it is Douglas Smith, an influential fixer in Johnson’s No 10 team, who is championing Badenoch’s candidacy for the education role – with a source quoted as saying: “She fights his war on woke”. Smith’s wife, Munira Mirza, who is head of the prime minister’s policy unit, is said to have joined Badenoch in influencing Johnson’s controversial move away from acknowledging the “feeling of injustice” among BLM protesters.
Instead, the prime minister said the discussion around race should be “more positive” and he wanted to end “the sense of victimisation” among minority ethnic groups. Another contentious public intervention was related to education – the brief she is being touted to fill. In October last year, during Black History Month, she rebuffed calls for more teaching of black history in schools with a scathing attack on critical race theory (CRT). Badenoch said she did not want white children being taught about “white privilege and their inherited racial guilt”, adding: “Any school which teaches these elements of political race theory as fact, or which promotes partisan political views such as defunding the police without offering a balanced treatment of opposing views, is breaking the law.” Leading academics accused the government of misrepresenting CRT while Simon Woolley, a former government race adviser, told the Guardian earlier this year that Badenoch’s words made him “weep”, adding: “Discriminatory factors have been writ large in education.” Her targets have not been restricted to academic theories. In June last year, she accused the BBC’s then-community affairs correspondent, Rianna Croxford, of “fanning the flames of racial division” after she reported that a black doctor had been sidelined from leading the Public Health England review into coronavirus risk factors. In January she attacked another black journalist, Nadine White, then at HuffPost, for putting questions to her office, in the standard manner, as to why Badenoch did not appear in a video promoting vaccine take-up in black, Asian and minority ethnic communities. In a Twitter thread she published screenshots of the questions and said it was “creepy and bizarre to fixate on who didn’t participate in a video and demand they explain themselves”. White said she was trolled, received nuisance calls and was forced to make her Twitter account private as a result. Despite widespread criticism of the minister’s conduct, Downing Street stood by Badenoch and the Cabinet Office dismissed a complaint about her. Her behaviour towards White was cited by Samuel Kasumu, the prime minister’s senior adviser on race, when he quit in the midst of the furore surrounding the government’s Commission on Race and Ethnic Disparities report, which was widely criticised for downplaying race as a factor in disparity of outcomes. Badenoch was the sponsoring minister of the commission and defended its findings in the Commons. In an interview, Kasumu told the Guardian: “There’s an assumption that I have issues with Kemi. I don’t have any personal issues with her. But when that happened, a lot of things went through my mind. I thought to myself, if that young journalist was my sister, or relative of mine, how would I feel about a minister responding to her in such a way? “I thought, if the journalist was Andrew Neil, or Laura Kuenssberg, or Robert Peston, would the minister have responded in the same way? Were the minister’s actions distracting people from very important public health messages? It just led me to the conclusion that it was completely unacceptable.”
One senior Conservative it would be a “ disaster” if she were appointed education secretary, describing her as “non collegiate.” However, another heaped praise on her: “There are too many people in the Conservative party that don’t actually have a view about what they want to do, she does – and she’s disliked by some because she’s actually changing stuff. She is going to be a contender one day.” Her worldview, she says, was shaped by her experience of growing up in Nigeria, where her parents moved from Wimbledon, south-west London after she was born, and then her experiences in England, where she returned to age 16. Born to two doctors, in her maiden Commons speech, she said she experienced poverty, because of the economic mismanagement in Nigeria. While Nigeria suffered from the fall in oil prices in the first half of the 1980s and was also under military dictatorship for a significant period of time, she told MPs she blamed the country’s ills on “socialist policies. It is not something I would wish on anyone, and it is just one of the reasons why I am a Conservative.” She experienced racism herself – although she did not call it that – at the hands of a teacher who told her to consider nursing when she said she wanted to be a doctor. “‘I can understand where the teacher was coming from … making an assumption that we were all a disadvantaged minority because of our skin colour. It’s typical of the mindset of the left,” she told the Daily Mail in 2017. Badenoch went to a Phoenix college in Morden, south-west London, while working part-time at McDonalds. She obtained a degree in engineering at the University of Sussex and worked in IT (while also studying for a law degree part-time), eventually becoming an associate director at the “Queen’s bank” Coutts. She met her husband, Hamish, who works for Deutsche Bank, at their local Conservative Association in 2005. Like Johnson, she worked at the Spectator, where she was head of digital, and she was elected as a member of the London Assembly in 2015, while he was still mayor. In 2018, asked about the “naughtiest” thing she had done, Badenoch said that she hacked Harriet Harman’s website in 2008, posting a hoax blogpost claiming the then-Labour minister was supporting Boris Johnson in the London mayoral race. Like Johnson she counts Margaret Thatcher and Winston Churchill among her political heroes. In Thatcher’s day, ministers were categorised as “radicals” or “consolidators” – whether she is the next education secretary may depend on which Johnson decides he wants. • This article was amended on 1 May 2023 to correct a reference to the month in which Badenoch made her Commons speech about critical race theory, which was October [2021], not November.