Here’s the trouble with Kemi Badenoch’s speech rejecting the extremist, racist rhetoric of Reform last week. It’s a bit late now. For years, the Tory leader has built up a body of work either excusing that rhetoric or gaslighting people of colour over its impact.
Don’t believe me? Have a look for the widely-discredited Sewell Report online. Published in 2021, it denied the existence of institutional racism in the UK, despite clear statistical evidence proving otherwise. It downplayed historical context, yet who was the report’s most prominent government defender at the time? One Kemi Badenoch.
Who was it who dismissed as “trivia” those disgusting remarks from Tory donor Frank Hester who claimed seeing Labour MP Diane Abbott made him want to hate all Black women – and that Diane should be shot.
Who was it who defended then-Shadow Justice Secretary Robert Jenrick who complained he didn’t see “another white face” during a visit to Birmingham?
Who was it who said, shockingly, that “not all cultures are equally valid”? Who, two years ago, described drives to diversify the workplace as a waste of money?
Who, as Equalities Minister, was vilified after leaked messages revealed in 2021 that she claimed not to “care about colonialism”.
Who was it who said it would be “breaking the law” for teachers to teach about the facts of systemic racism, statistically proven to exist to this day?
Who was it who said that any racial prejudice she has encountered “is always from the left” and never from the Conservative Party?
One Kemi Badenoch. And that last question is key because so many of the thinly-veiled xenophobic attacks she is now facing are from Reform, to which so many ex-Tory MPs and cabinet ministers – people she sat alongside and defended – have since defected.
So yes, her speech may have been widely praised but most, if not all the MPs and political commentators doing so have zero experience of what it is to be a person of colour affected by the toxic rhetoric from people just like Kemi Badenoch.
“We are not reuniting with that,” she said last week, ruling out a Tory-Reform coalition. “I don’t want to live in a country run by people who threaten journalists, who call veterans traitors and who debate whether my mixed-race children are English.
“I don’t want to explain to my son when we are watching our brilliant English team play football, that some people don’t think that Black players are English.”
All very noble and well said, of course. But Olukemi Olufunto Adegoke Badenoch would never have come within a million miles of the Tory leadership had she not been prepared to do what Suella Braverman is doing right now for Reform –become the face for the kind of extremism rampant on the right wing of UK politics.
Its been Kemi’s special sauce for years. She has slathered it liberally all over her politics to smooth her ascent to power. But now the far right are reminding her of her full name.
Now the extremists are reminding her of her Nigerian background. The problem for her now is that her mixed-race children are having to live in the toxic society she helped foment. And regardless of my contempt for her, her kids are innocents.
They do not deserve the kind of hate disguised as debate that she emboldened from the despatch box, now playing out in our UK streets.
Badenoch left us and our children exposed to that and worse. She played a key role in turning the country into a powder keg when we begged her to stop.
Mothers, just like her, and fathers have been left terrified for years that the ways in which she has emboldened extremists could prove deadly for their kids. Her condemnation of the racists now appears more like a move to grab centre-right support than a rejection of her own politics.
But it’s all a bit late now. Time will tell if she has genuinely seen the light.