Kemi Badenoch

Olukemi Olufunto "Kemi" Badenoch (/ˈbeɪdnɒk/ BAYD-nok; née Adegoke, 2 January 1980) is a British politician. A member of the Conservative Party, in 2017 she was elected as the Member of Parliament (MP) for Saffron Walden in Essex, having previously served as a Member of the London Assembly. Badenoch supported Brexit in the 2016 European Union membership referendum. After a series of junior ministerial positions under Boris Johnson from 2019 to 2022, she served as Secretary of State for Business and Trade from 2023 and President of the Board of Trade and Minister for Women and Equalities from 2022, until the 2024 general election. Following Labour's return to government after the election, Badenoch was a candidate to become leader of the Conservatives.

Kemi Badenoch in 2022

Quotes

2023

• We live in a multiracial society, we're very, very comfortable with that because if were weren't we wouldn't have the prime minister, we wouldn't have the home secretary or business secretary that we have. But we have to be very careful about how we explain and express immigration policies so that people aren't getting echoes of things that are less palatable.
  • From a speech at a fringe meeting during the Conservative Party conference (3 October 2023), as cited in "Suella Braverman warns of ‘hurricane of migrants’ — as it happened", The Times
  • Suella Braverman, the home secretary, had claimed multiculturalism in the UK had failed.

• It wasn't until predators started exploiting the loopholes that we are having to tighten this.
  It is the behaviour of people who are choosing to exploit rights given to transgender people — because the definition is very loose — that we are now having to look at what we can do in order to protect women and children who are the most vulnerable in those single-sex spaces.
  It is not easy, the ideal situation would have been if the predators had not chosen to exploit this loophole.
  [Badenoch "insisted she was not saying transgender people were predators."] But there are more people who are predators than there are people who are trans.
• [Predators exploitation of loopholes] We see it with men exposing themselves in bathrooms. We see it with people trying to access single-sex spaces such as women's prisons when they have been convicted for violence against women, and their victims are being forced to refer to them with female pronouns. That is not right.
  So we have to make sure that we can sweep all that away and when we do, life will get better for transgender people.
  • From a hearing of the House of Commons Women and Equalities Committee (13 December 2023), as cited in "Kemi Badenoch: We must protect single-sex spaces because predators outnumber trans people", The Times (14 December 2023)
  • See the Isla Bryson case. Bryson (previously known as Adam Graham), a convicted double rapist unquestionably male at the time of the offences, chose to identify as female after being charged in Scotland. After conviction in January 2023, Bryson was briefly placed in a women's prison.

2024–present

• The law is confused because times have changed and words in law are being re-interpreted to meanings quite different from what legislators intended. Clarification is required. Not just to protect the privacy and dignity of women and girls, but also to protect those people with gender dysphoria for whom the law was set up to protect. These transpeople were going about their lives in peace, until predators started exploiting loopholes in the law by calling themselves trans with no evidence beyond their self-identification.
  Sex and gender, terms once used interchangeably in the law, now mean different things with significant implications. This is being exploited by all sorts of activist organisations, most notably Stonewall for their own agenda. That is why we are today pledging that, if we form a government after the [general] election, we will clarify that sex in the law means biological sex and not new, redefined meanings of the word. The protection of women and girls' spaces is too important to allow the confusion to continue.
  • Announcing a proposal to amend the Equality Act 2010 in "Tory vow to end abuse of gender laws by predators", The Times (2 June 2024)

• Nigel Farage is still against many Conservatives, including some of my colleagues. [...] What he wants to do is destroy the Conservative Party.
  The Conservative Party is an institution; it is the longest-running party in the history of the world. I think that what we should be talking about is how to make sure it keeps going from strength to strength, not trashing it, destroying it, or taking it over.
  • On Nick Ferrari at Breakfast (LBC, 3 June 2024), as cited in "Nigel Farage 'wants to destroy the Conservative Party', Kemi Badenoch tells LBC", LBC (3 June 2024, updated 6 June 2024)
  • It was being speculated in the media that Farage would rejoin the Conservative Party after the general election on 4 July 2024. When asked in a Sunday Times interview about a potential merger between Reform and his former party, he described his intent as "[m]ore like a takeover."

• I will not shut up. I will not be silenced by men who prioritise applause from Stonewall over the safety of women and girls.
  A rich, lefty, white male celebrity so blinded by ideology he can't see the optics of attacking the only black woman in government by calling publicly for my existence to end.
  Tennant is one of Labours celebrity supporters. This is an early example of what life will be like if they win.
  • From a series of posts on X, as cited in "Kemi Badenoch brands David Tennant 'rich, lefty, white male celebrity' in trans row", The Telegraph (25 June 2024)
  • On 21 June 2024, actor David Tennant at the British LGBT Awards (where he was honoured as a celebrity ally of the trans community) said in an acceptance speech: "However, until we wake up and Kemi Badenoch doesn't exist any more."

• Culture is more than cuisine or clothes. It's also customs which may be at odds with British values. We cannot be naïve and assume immigrants will automatically abandon ancestral ethnichostilities at the border, or that all cultures are equally valid. They are not. I am struck for example, by the number of recent immigrants to the UK who hate Israel. That sentiment has no place here.
  • "Migrants who come to Britain must uphold its traditions, not change them", The Telegraph (28 September 2024)

• I would be congratulating Prime Minister Netanyahu. I think what they did was extraordinary.
  Israel is showing that it has moral clarity in dealing with its enemies and the enemies of the West as well. [...] Hezbollah is a terrorist organisation, and I think that being able to remove the leader of Hezbollah, as they did, will create more peace in the Middle East.
  • Interviewed on Sunday Morning With Trevor Phillips (29 September 2024), as cited in "Tory leadership contest shows striking lack of focus on issues that cost party the election", Sky News (29 September 2024)
  • The Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah was killed in Beirut two days before.

• [On civil servants] There's about 5-10% of them who are very, very bad. You know, should-be-in-prison bad. [...] Leaking official secrets, undermining their ministers … agitating. I had some of it in my department, usually union-led, but most of them actually want to do a good job. And the good ones are very frustrated by the bad ones.
  • Speaking at a Conservative Party conference fringe meeting (1 October 2024) organised by The Spectator magazine, as cited by Jessica Elgot in "Some civil servants so bad they should be in prison, says Kemi Badenoch", The Guardian (1 October 2024).
  • Asked later about these comments, a source close to Badenoch said she had been joking.