Ashcroft Blue Ambition

The Unauthorised Biography of Kemi Badenoch
1. Auflage 2024
ISBN: 978-1-78590-925-2
Verlag: Biteback Publishing
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 320 Seiten

During the Conservative Party leadership contest in the summer of 2022, Kemi Badenoch made an immediate impression on the public as a politician with robust views and a strong personality. Although only a junior minister at the time, she was marked out as a rising star and, having exited the race after the fourth ballot, even as a potential future leader. From September 2022, she served in the Cabinets of Liz Truss and Rishi Sunak, combining her post as the Secretary of State for Business and Trade with that of the Minister for Women and Equalities. Badenoch's centre-right instincts and admiration for Margaret Thatcher have helped to guarantee that her popularity among the grassroots of her party remains high, yet her background is unusual by Westminster's standards. Having been born in London and raised in Nigeria, she describes herself as 'to all intents and purposes a first-generation immigrant'. She returned to Britain aged sixteen to sit her A-levels before studying computer systems engineering at the University of Sussex. She then worked in the banking sector before becoming a Member of the London Assembly in 2015 and, in 2017, entering the House of Commons as the MP for Saffron Walden. So what makes Badenoch tick? How has she achieved Cabinet rank so quickly? And what would be the implications for the direction of the Conservative Party if she did become its leader? In this meticulously researched biography, Michael Ashcroft charts Badenoch's fascinating course from relative obscurity to being hailed in some quarters as the saviour of conservatism in the UK.

LORD ASHCROFT KCMG PC is an international businessman, philanthropist, author and pollster. He is a former deputy chairman of the Conservative Party and currently honorary chairman of the International Democracy Union. He is founder and chairman of the board of trustees of Crimestoppers, vice-patron of the Intelligence Corps Museum, chairman of the trustees of Ashcroft Technology Academy, a senior fellow of the International Strategic Studies Association, a life governor of the Royal Humane Society, a former chancellor of Anglia Ruskin University and a former trustee of Imperial War Museums. Lord Ashcroft is an award-winning author who has written twenty-eight other books, largely on politics and bravery. His political books include biographies of David Cameron, Jacob Rees-Mogg, Rishi Sunak, Sir Keir Starmer, Angela Rayner and Carrie Johnson. His seven books on gallantry in the Heroes series include two on the Victoria Cross.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Ashcroft, Michael

Leseproben

Chapter 1

The Cosbys

In December 1979, a young husband and wife from Nigeria travelled thousands of miles into the depths of a London winter on a mission to ensure the baby they were expecting could be delivered in what they believed was the best environment money could buy. A few days after a consultation with a Harley Street doctor, they headed south to the suburb of Wimbledon. There, at St Teresa’s Maternity Hospital, they waited for the miracle of a new life to begin. At the time St Teresa’s, which was run by an order of Roman Catholic nuns called the Sisters of St Anne, was known as a private maternity clinic to the stars. During the 1970s, the children of the media tycoon Rupert Murdoch, the James Bond actor George Lazenby and the Rolling Stones guitarist Mick Taylor were among those born there. On Wednesday 2 January 1980, the name Olukemi Olufunto Adegoke was added to the clinic’s record of births. Neither the child’s mother, Feyi, nor her father, Femi, could have known it then, but their decision to make the trip to Britain would prove highly significant. For even though the infant was taken straight back home to Lagos to be brought up there, she had acquired a legal right to UK citizenship by virtue of having been born on British soil. Ultimately, this status cleared the path for her to return to London as a teenager in the 1990s, to make a life for herself in this country and, in 2017, to become an MP, which she did under her married name, Kemi Badenoch.

Between the 1960s and the 1980s, it was not unusual for Nigerian women – nor, indeed, those from a range of other countries who could afford the airfare and medical bills – to opt for treatment at the appealingly old-fashioned St Teresa’s. It had opened in 1938 as a private hospital for patients with advanced cancer and heart disease, but after the NHS was founded a decade later, it was converted into a small maternity unit. For the next nineteen years, just over half of its seventy or so beds were funded by an NHS contract. This model made it possible for the Sisters of St Anne and their lay colleagues to care for the marginalised in society, to whom they felt a duty, as well as better-off clients who could pay. When the clinic’s NHS funding was cancelled in 1967, the nuns were determined to carry on with their work. They did so via a mixture of private patients’ fees, donations, bequests and the efforts of volunteers, looking after the needs of as many women as they could, regardless of their financial position. St Teresa’s international reputation was well deserved. The standard of care there was so high that between 1948 and 1974, only one mother died in more than 28,000 deliveries. It made a point of not being a conveyer belt-style institution but a place where women were given individual attention and, if they wanted it, time to recuperate in relaxed surroundings after the rigours of childbirth. Badenoch’s parents liked the hospital so much they returned there in order that Feyi could give birth to their next child, a son, Folahan, in June 1982. Despite the best efforts of the nuns, however, funding dried up not long afterwards and the hospital was forced to close in 1986. It has since been demolished and a block of flats has been built on its former site.

Kemi Badenoch’s birth was formally registered by her mother in the London borough of Merton the day after she was born and it is through the information included on her birth certificate that it is possible to start piecing together her parents’ backgrounds and, by extension, some details of her own upbringing. The certificate lists two addresses for Feyi Adegoke. Her British address in January 1980 was given as Flat 31, Ayerst Court, Beaumont Road, Walthamstow, in the outer reaches of north-east London. In fact, this property was where her brother, Emerson Adubifa, and her sister-in-law, Elizabeth, lived. Two weeks after recording the birth with the British authorities, the Adegokes and their newborn daughter were safely installed at the other address on the certificate – their own home, 73 Itire Road in the Lagos district of Surulere.

The Adegokes were an English-speaking couple who belonged to the Yoruba people, a west African ethnic group that makes up about a fifth of the population of Nigeria. Britain first annexed Lagos in the 1860s and from 1914 Nigeria became part of the British Empire, gaining independence in 1960. This meant that Badenoch’s parents both grew up in a British colony until they were ten or eleven years old. They had met in the mid-1970s at University College Hospital in Ibadan, the capital city of Oyo state in the south-west of the country. Femi was working there as a houseman, having graduated as a doctor from the University of Lagos in 1974, and his future wife, Feyi, was a postgraduate student specialising in medical physiology.

Although Femi’s family were practising Anglicans, his mother, Esther, was born into a Muslim family and by one account lived a rather extraordinary life. She entered into a polygamous marriage as a young woman but left her first husband, who was abusive, and later married Daniel Adegoke, who worked for the Ports Authority as an engineer and draughtsman. They had six children together, one of whom was Femi. She later became a successful trader, dealing in gold and jewellery and selling fabric by the yard from her shop in the largest market in Lagos. She had no formal education and could not read or write, but the wealth she built up from scratch was sufficient to have Femi educated at Ibadan Grammar School, which, like most schools in Nigeria, was fee-paying. Some of her other children attended universities in America.

Badenoch’s mother, Feyi, was one of seven children. Her father, Badenoch’s grandfather, was the Rev. Emmanuel Adubifa, a Methodist minister. Badenoch is herself a baptised Methodist, though she is no longer religious. The connection between Britain and Nigeria remained strong after independence and Badenoch’s parents were both able to travel to the UK when they were university students in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Dr Abiola Tilley Gyado, who knew them both independently, remembers, ‘We’d say to each other “Are you going on summer flight?” That meant “Are you going to London?” Students could have holiday jobs in Britain. It was considered acceptable. Kemi’s mother and I travelled to London together.’

Femi and Feyi were married in 1977 at Hoare’s Memorial Methodist Cathedral in Lagos. By then, Feyi was a lecturer at the University of Lagos’s College of Medicine, where she would go on to become a professor of medical physiology. In the early 1980s, Femi decided to open his own private GP’s practice, which he combined with working in a teaching hospital. Private healthcare options have always been prevalent in Nigeria because of its underfunded state healthcare service and over time Femi’s clinic, which was called Iwosan, meaning ‘healing’, began to thrive. It was based on the ground floor of 73 Itire Road, which Femi eventually inherited from his mother. The young family lived in the three-bedroom flat upstairs and this was the place Kemi Badenoch called home for the first thirteen years of her life.

After the civil war that had scarred Nigeria in the late 1960s had ended, the 1970s was a boom decade. Lagos, which remained the capital until 1991, was at the centre of this economic upswing. Oil had first been discovered in Nigeria in 1956 and over the next fifteen years production grew steadily to a peak of 2.3 million barrels per day, turning it into the wealthiest and most diverse nation in Africa. Indeed, Nigeria became so prosperous that it was able to export food. Inevitably, the population of Lagos, its largest city, increased at a dizzying rate, from approximately 2.5 million in 1980 to almost 5 million by 1990, as it attracted people from all over the African continent seeking work. Some of the money generated by the oil industry found its way to Badenoch’s father’s clinic, which secured contracts to treat the employees of various oil companies, and it continued to flow steadily during the earliest years of Badenoch’s life. Yet friends say that the Adegokes remained pretty typical among middle-ranking educated Yoruba families living in Lagos at the time, being comfortable rather than truly affluent. There was certainly nothing ostentatious about their life. They had no driver, for instance, though some middle-class families did, and they had no domestic staff either. The children were expected to help their parents keep the house tidy.

Badenoch’s father was not the only person in the family who enjoyed professional success during the 1980s. In 1985, her mother, Feyi, was awarded a fellowship to a medical college in Omaha, Nebraska. By then Kemi and Folahan had been joined by a sister, Funlola, born in Lagos in 1984. Feyi and the three children moved to America for almost a year. When they returned to Africa in 1986, it was time for Badenoch to start school. One of the most enduring legacies left by the British in Nigeria is its education system, so much so that even today the two countries are broadly in line with each other when it comes to schooling. Badenoch first went to St Saviour’s, a traditional primary school for children up to the age of eleven. Her father had a strong interest in music and enjoyed listening to a wide range of styles, from the...