Lord Brady reviews 'Blue Ambition: The Unauthorised Biography of Kemi Badenoch'

Finchley, March 2022: Kemi Badenoch visits McDonald’s UK headquarters | Image by: Jeff Gilbert / Alamy Stock Photo

Lord Brady

Michael Ashcroft’s political biographies usually have a purpose. Red Queen was written to make trouble for Angela Rayner. Blue Ambition has been perfectly timed to introduce us to one of the leading contenders for the Tory crown. Kemi Badenoch is well-known as a trenchant critic of wokery and has a reputation as a politician who will “cross the road to start a fight”, but Ashcroft paints a picture of a more complex character. 

Badenoch was born in London but grew up in Nigeria with a family from a strong medical background, whose fortunes ebbed and flowed with the economy as it was battered by decades of corruption and successive socialist governments. This gave her a firm belief in market economics and a clear-headed understanding of what a great country Britain is. With so many politicians who seem to think we should be embarrassed by our country, she has the advantage of having seen Britain from a distance. Growing up in a culture in which opportunities for women were limited, she looked to Margaret Thatcher as an inspiration. She also said that when the boys in Lagos told her that she couldn’t do something because she was a girl, the two words “Margaret Thatcher” were an unanswerable response.

Ashcroft doesn’t present a eulogy

 Her family is described as being close but, by Nigerian standards, “relaxed and informal”. A voracious reader of The Famous Five and The Secret Seven, she won a national chess competition at the age of seven.

Returning to London at the age of 16, Badenoch was shocked by a ”culture of low expectations” at her sixth form college, and encountering a lot of “middle-class lefties” while studying computer engineering at the University of Sussex helped to forge her Conservative thinking. As someone who describes herself as “effectively, a first-generation immigrant” – with what a school friend says is an unwavering sense that her inner strength would come to the fore – it would be easy to conclude that here is a woman whose aspiration trips over into overweening ambition; but former MP Lee Rowley tells us that he and a group of like-minded friends had to persuade her to stand for the leadership in 2022 – and stresses that her resignation from the Johnson government wasn’t an act of positioning for the inevitable leadership election.

Overall we are shown a politician whose views are held with immense conviction but we also get glimpses of the more subtle politician who defended Theresa May’s withdrawal agreement as a pragmatic step, given that a perfect departure from the EU was unattainable in the circumstances. Anti-woke, anti-critical race theory, averse to the nonsense of ‘white privilege’, she knows what direction she should point in but can also bide her time.

Ashcroft doesn’t present a eulogy. Blue Ambition is the story of a spiky, sometimes pugnacious individual with courage and conviction.

 If she wins the leadership election, she might one day be the first British prime minister who can build her own computers. 

Lord Brady of Altrincham is a Conservative peer

Blue Ambition: The Unauthorised Biography of Kemi Badenoch
By: Michael Ashcroft
Publisher: Biteback

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