Kemi Badenoch fingers peerage to £2,500 donor she’d already given a plum job

Kemi Badenoch handed a peerage to a key donors in her first honours list.

Joanne Cash gave £2,500 to Ms Badenoch to help fund her first leadership campaign in 2022.

Last year, when Ms Badenoch was Business Secretary, she was criticised for giving Ms Cash a job as a commissioner to the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) – without declaring a political interest in her appointment.

Ms Cash married to MindGym co-founder, Octavius Black, a former school friend of David Cameron.

She made the donation under her married name, Joanne Black.

Ms Cash stood unsuccessfully to be a Tory MP in 2010, losing the election to former Labour MP Karen Buck.

Ms Badenoch’s first honours list also included self-styled free speech champion and professional provocateur Toby Young, despite a long history of sexist and homophobic comments.

Mr Young, the founder of the Free Speech Union and author of the memoir “How to Lose Friends and Alienate People”, was given a seat in the House of Lords by the Tory leader, in a decision likely to court controversy. The right-winger was forced to resign from the Office for Students (OfS) in 2018 after an outcry over offensive comments he’d made in the past.

Screenshots of tweets in Mr Young’s name from 2009-10 depicted him telling one person “f*** you, penis breath”, calling George Clooney “queer as a coot” and joking of the Emmys: “There should be an award for Best Baps.”

In 2011, he tweeted about a female MP’s cleavage in Parliament. He also joked about visiting a bar full of “hardcore dykes”. In another post, he appeared to say of a woman: “I had my d*** up her a***.”

A particularly offensive tweet in 2009 reportedly showed him joking about masturbating over images of starving children in Kenya featured in a Comic Relief programme.