In This Biography

Olukemi Badenoch Biography, Life, Career, Spouse, Networth

Olukemi Olufunto Badenoch (/’beIdnak/ Olukemi Olufunto Badenoch (/’beId BAD-@-n@kh, nee Adegoke born on 2 January 1980) is a British politician who has been a Member of the Parliament (MP) from Saffron Walden since 2017. An active member of the Conservative Party, she served as Minister of State for Local Government, Faith, and Communities and Minister of State for Equalities between 2021 and 2022.

QUICK DATA

FULL NAMES – Olukemi Olufunto Badenoch
Nationality – British/Nigerian
SPOUSE – Hamish Badenoch
PLACE OF BIRTH – Wimbledon, London, England.
WEBSITE – https://www.kemibadenoch.org.uk/
DATE OF BIRTH – 2 January 1980
Alma Mater University of Sussex
Birkbeck, University of London

Badenoch is a native of Wimbledon, London, to parents who were of Nigerian origin. Her early life was spent living in Lagos, Nigeria, and in the US. She returned to the United Kingdom at the age of 16. After having completed her studies in Computer Systems Engineering at the University of Sussex, Badenoch was employed as an engineer of the software with Logica. After completing her law studies at Birkbeck, University of London She worked for the Royal Bank of Scotland Group as a systems analyst prior to being the associate director of Coutts and later, as director of the digital for The Spectator magazine.

The year 2012 was the time that Badenoch failed to win a place in the London Assembly. A few years later, she was appointed as a London Assembly member. Badenoch was a proponent of Brexit during the referendum in 2016 regarding EU membership. She was elected to the seat of Saffron Walden in Essex at the general election in 2017. Following the election of Boris Johnson became Prime Minister in July of this year, Badenoch was appointed Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State to Children and Families. After the reshuffle in February, she was named Exchequer Secretary of the Treasury and Parliamentary Under-Secretary for State to Equalities. In September 2021 she was promoted to Minister of State Equalities and then appointed the Minister of State responsible for Local Government, Faith, and Communities.

On July 20, 2022, Badenoch quit as minister after the resignation of Boris Johnson, she declared her candidacy for her candidacy for the Conservative Party leadership election.

Childhood and early life

Badenoch began her life in the year 1980 at Wimbledon, London, to Femi and Feyi Adegoke. The father of the couple was a doctor and her mother was an instructor in biology. There are two siblings in her family: one of them is called Fola and a sibling named Lola. Badenoch’s early years were spent in Lagos, Nigeria, and in the United States, where her mother taught. She return to the UK at 16 years old to stay with a relative of her mother’s due to the worsening economic and political situation in Nigeria that had affected her family. The A-levels she earned at Phoenix College, a former higher education institution located in Morden, London while working in a branch of McDonald’s.

Badenoch completed her studies in Computer Systems Engineering at the University of Sussex, completing an MEng in 2003. She started her career in the IT sector, initially working as a software engineer for Logica (later CGI Group) between 2003 and 2006. While there, she took law classes part-time through Birkbeck, University of London, and then completed the LLB in 2009. Badenoch was then employed as an analyst for systems with the Royal Bank of Scotland Group after which she pursued an interest in consulting and financial services. She was employed as associate director at private banks and wealth manager Coutts from 2006 until 2013. She was later promoted to digital director for The Spectator from 2015 to the year 2016.

Kemi Badenoch Career in politics

Badenoch was a member of Badenoch who joined the Conservative Party in 2005 at the age of 25. In the general election of 2010, she ran in her Dulwich as well as the West Norwood constituency against Labour’s Tessa Jowell and came third.

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The following year, Badenoch stood for the Conservatives in the London Assembly election, and she was ranked fifth on the Londonwide list. In the election, the Conservatives get just three seats on the London-wide list, and Badenoch did not win. The following year, during the general election of 2015, Victoria Borwick was elected to the House of Commons and subsequently removed herself from the London Assembly. The fourth candidate on the ballot, Suella Fernandes, had also been elected to the House of Commons and did not accept the position. Badenoch (as she changed her name after her wedding to her husband in the year 2012) was declared an official Assembly Member. She was later able to hold her position in the Assembly during the election of 2016.

Badenoch was shortlisted as one of the Conservative Party candidates for the marginal Hampstead and Kilburn constituency during the general election in 2017, but she failed. She was eventually chosen to be the Conservative candidate Saffron Walden, which is a safe place for the Conservative Party that she won with 37,629 votes and a plurality of 24,966 (41.0 percent). In her inaugural statement as an MP on the 19th of July, she spoke of the vote in favor of Brexit in terms of “the greatest ever vote of confidence in the project of the United Kingdom” and she cited some of her own heroes including Conservative political leaders Winston Churchill, Airey Neave, and Margaret Thatcher.

The same month, Badenoch was chosen to join the 1922 Executive Committee. In September she was named to the parliamentarian Justice Select Committee.

She was appointed the Vice Chair of the Conservative Party of Candidates in January. In April of 2018, The Mail on Sunday obtained footage of an interview Badenoch conducted along with Core Politics, where she admitted to hacking the website of an MP Labour member in 2008. The person who was targeted is Harriet Harman, who was the Deputy Leader at the time of the Labour Party. Harman accepted Badenoch’s apology however, the incident had to be reported to Action Fraud, the UK’s cybercrime reporting center.

In July of 2019, Badenoch was appointed as Parliamentary Under Secretary of States to Children and Families by the Premier Secretary, Boris Johnson.

Badenoch voted for Brexit during her vote in the UK EU referendum on membership. She voted for the Prime Prime Minister’s Brexit withdrawal agreement at the beginning of 2019. In the indicative vote on the 27th of March, she voted in favor of the referendum on a withdrawal agreement, and against an agreement to join the customs union with the EU. Then, in October Badenoch was a Johnson supporter in the withdrawal accord. In the general election of December, she was elected with a higher percentage of 27,594 (43.7 percent) votes.

In February of 2020, Badenoch was appointed Exchequer Secretary to the Treasury and the Parliamentary Under Secretary of States (Minister of Equalities) within the Department for International Trade. She is a member of the Public Accounts Committee since March 2020. In a Black History Month debate in the House of Commons in October 2020, she reiterated the opposition of the government to secondary and primary schools that teach white privilege as well as similar “elements of critical race theory” as factual and uncontested.

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ConservativeHome readers voted the speech of Badenoch about critical race theories in 2020 as “the best speech of the year” in which she claimed that schools that teach “elements of political race theory as fact, or which promotes partisan political views such as defunding the police without offering a balanced treatment of opposing views, is breaking the law”.

Badenoch published a series of tweets in the month of January in which she provided pictures of questions addressed to her office by HuffPost reporter Nadine White who she, as a consequence claimed to have committed “creepy and bizarre behavior”. White then removed her Twitter account and cited the abuse she had received. Badenoch’s actions were condemned by both her own National Union of Journalists and the Council of Europe’s Safety of Journalists Platform. Her defense was offered by the media secretary for the prime minister, who said the whole thing was a “misunderstanding”.

In the month of March 2021, Badenoch was advised to “consider her position” as the minister of equality in the presence of Jayne Ozanne, one of three senior government LGBT advisers who left their positions because of the decision taken by the government to not prohibit conversion therapy. Ozanne commented on a speech delivered by Badenoch about the subject as “appalling” and the “final straw”.

In a debate at the House of Commons in April 2021, Badenoch criticized the Labour Party’s response to a report released in the Commission on Race and Ethnic Disparities that had concluded that Britain is not a racist institution. Labour has declared the report to be “cherry-picking of data”, as the Frontbench leader Dawn Butler claimed the report was “gaslighting on a national scale” and described those who wrote it as “racial gatekeepers.” Badenoch said that he had accused Labour of “wilful misrepresentations” over the report and countered Butler’s assertions by saying “It is not right to label people who support different approaches as racists or race traitors. It’s just as reckless, and dangerous, to use ethnic minorities as racist slurs such as Uncle Toms’s coconuts, uncle Toms slaves, or house negroes just for taking the risk of thinking differently.”

In a reshuffle of the government that took place in the month of September 2021. Badenoch got promoted as Minister of State Equalities and then appointed the Minister of State Housing, Communities, and Local Government. Following her appointment, Vice News said they received audio leaked from the year 2018 in which Badenoch made fun of gay marriage, called transgender women in the same way in the same way as “men” and used the term”transsexual” which is considered offensive by many trans people. Within days of her appointment, the title Minister of State Housing, Communities and Local Government was changed to Minister of State for Levelling Up Communities.

The candidate for the leadership position

On July 6, 2022, Badenoch was forced to resign from the cabinet and cited Boris Johnson’s handling of the Chris Pincher scandal, in the joint statement she issued along with fellow Ministers Alex Burghart, Neil O’Brien, Lee Rowley, and Julia Lopez. The next day, she announced an effort to replace Johnson in the role of Conservative the party’s leader. The announcement was made in an article in The Times in which she declared that she would “tell the truth” and called for “strong but limited government”. She called the goal of zero carbon emissions net “ill-thought-through” and said that politicians were “hooked on the idea of the state fixing the majority of problems”. The campaign was launched with an event that took place on July 12th.

Kemi Badenoch Personal life

Kemi was married to Hamish Badenoch. They are parents to two girls and an infant son. Hamish is employed by Deutsche Bank and was a Conservative councilor from 2014 until the year 2018 on Merton London Borough Council, serving as the representative for Wimbledon Village. He also unsuccessfully ran for Foyle in Foyle’s Northern Ireland Conservatives at the general election in 2015.