‘Kemi Badenoch has made being offensive and rude into an art form’

Read time: 4 mins

In brief…

• Tory leader Kemi Badenoch has spoken with pride about getting a child expelled from school for cheating in an exam – but years later, is bitter she wasn’t praised for her actions.
• She also reveals how she lost her faith in God due to the actions of Josef Fritzl, who locked his daughter in a cellar for 24 years.
• The News Agents discuss whether her attempt to appear more authentic, like Nigel Farage and Boris Johnson have done with ease, might have pushed the dial a little too far, and been a bit too honest for her own good.

What’s the story?

The Tories have a problem. From 14 years in government to languishing third or fourth in UK opinion polls, the party needs some serious action to kickstart its election chances.

Having leader Kemi Badenoch talk openly about Josef Fritzl and getting exam cheats expelled from school probably isn’t the shot in the arm MPs and supporters have been hoping for.

“I was the person who would say 'that person is copying notes from the other person’,” Badenoch says in a new interview with the BBC.

She describes an “extraordinary day” in school during her mid teens, when she spotted a classmate cheating during an exam.

“I stood up in the middle of the exam, and I stood up and said: ‘He's cheating. He's the one that's doing it’,” she says.

“That boy ended up getting expelled, and I didn't get praised for it.”

She also spoke about her Christian beliefs, saying she stopped believing in God when the crimes of Josef Fritzl – who held his daughter (who he raped and assaulted) in a basement for 24 years in Austria – were revealed in 2008.

“Whenever I was having a tough time, I did find strength in faith,” she said.

“[I believed] God does not test you beyond what you can bear.

“I thought to myself, no human being should have had to experience what this woman did.”

Why did Kemi Badenoch give answers like these?

It’s not easy to give a good interview when you’re a party leader – just ask Theresa May, whose 2017 “fields of wheat” response must still haunt her to this day.

But it comes naturally to others – with Nigel Farage often praised for ’telling it like it is’, and Boris Johnson being known to ruffle his hair before TV cameras started rolling, to portray a more disheveled – and ultimately more appealing – character on screen.

LBC’s political correspondent Aggie Chambre tells Lewis Goodall she believes Badenoch’s frank, and unusual answers, were an attempt to establish herself as a more authentic political personality.

“People say Nigel Farage says what he thinks, but you'd never hear Nigel Farage saying something like that,” Aggie says.

“Farage tends to say what he thinks, but has thought about it before – she genuinely says what she thinks.

“I think the truth is, that actually Badenoch is a more authentic figure than Farage. She's just too authentic, she's too much herself.”

Lewis describes Farage as a more “calibrated” political operator – something Badenoch is yet to achieve.

Will Badenoch endear herself to voters?

In an era where Nigel Farage is one of the most popular politicians in the UK, and Liberal Democrats’ leader Ed Davey spent most of the 2024 election campaign riding water slides and falling into sewage-filled lakes, it’s clear that people are looking for something different from their leaders.

Authenticity, however cultivated and pre-prepared, is now as important to many voters as strong policies.

But has Badenoch shown the sort of authenticity people are looking for?

“The problem is, people say they want politicians with lots of personality, but if you have a really unpleasant personality then you're authentically unpleasant, which is not completely ideal,” Lewis says.

“She's made being offensive and rude into an art form.”

Aggie admits that comments about notorious rapists and exam-cheats will certainly keep people interested, and believes it may be enough to keep her in the leader role until the next election.

And while it’s easy to laugh at her pride in getting a child expelled from school (and her lasting rage at getting no praise from it), Lewis has praise for how open Badenoch has been about her faith.

“In one way that I really admire her for being so candid about something so personal as religion,” he says.

“Obviously what happened in the Fritzl case is no laughing matter, but if you're her aide, you must be constantly astonished by the things that she brings up.

“She's a never ending journey of surprises, isn't she?”

Listen to the latest episode of The News Agents.