Kemi Badenoch: ‘Parenting is a two-person job. Where are the dads?’

The Tory leadership contender credits her own supportive family for her success. It should be acceptable to talk about absent fathers as a serious issue, she say

Caroline Wheeler, Political Editor

Saturday October 19 2024, 6.00pm BST, The Sunday Times

When Kemi Badenoch’s mother heard she was running to become the leader of the Conservative Party, her reaction was far from enthusiastic.

“My mum said, ‘don’t do it’ why would you ever want to do this?’,” Badenoch recalled. “My mum just thought that politics is a very horrible business. People are mean to you. They say all sorts of nasty things and it’s dangerous. She worries about it.”

However, her father, Femi Adegoke, a doctor and the much-loved patriarch of the family, who died in February 2022, who encouraged her to become one of Britain’s leading politicians.

“It was my dad who was excited about me becoming a politician,” she said.

Badenoch, who at 44 is one of the country’s most recognisable politicians, attributes much of her success to her family. She believes that “not having a good family” is the “biggest barrier” to success in life. That’s why she believes that family is one of the Conservative principles that has been most neglected.

In what will be seen as a swipe at the veteran Tory MP Sir Christopher Chope, who suggested last week that she may struggle to be party leader because she is “preoccupied with her children”, the mother of three said there needs to be more discussion about “how parenting is a two-person job”.

Badenoch, who is in the final two in the race to succeed Rishi Sunak, criticised the John Major government for its “back to basics” campaign which extolled the virtues of the traditional family.

Speaking in the Celtic Manor Hotel near Newport, south Wales, between hustings where she is vying with Robert Jenrick for the votes of the Tory membership, she said: “I think we ran into trouble decades ago when we were very critical of single parenthood. It sounded as if we were always talking about single mums. Where are the dads? Why are the dads not there? Why are they not looking after their families?

“I remember early on as an MP, I did quite a lot of casework on absent fathers who the Child Support Agency was chasing. I think if people make children, they should be made to look after them. Family is important.

“And if you look at the prison population, the vast majority of the male prison population did not grow up with their fathers. If fathers look after their children better, they will be less likely to end up in prison. And those are the sorts of things that we need to talk about more.”

Badenoch said that if families were not looked after “things get worse for everybody”.

“Families come in different shapes and sizes, but having that support of people who love you and who can take care of you is essential,” she said. “I think that if you don’t have that, it is the biggest barrier to success in life. Not having a good family, the family you’re born into, has a much bigger impact on your life chances than the school you go to.

“And I know this because I know that if I’d been born into another family, even within my extended family, instead of my parents, things might have been very different … and we should do everything we can to make sure that families thrive and have the support that they need.”

However, Badenoch does not believe the government can “fix” the fertility crisis. The UK’s birth rate has fallen to its lowest level since records began in 1939.

“I’m not sure government can make people have more babies,” she said. “Lots of countries have tried lots of things and they haven’t worked. I think people are having fewer children because they have more choice.

“I think that we’ve also scared a lot of people by saying things like, ‘oh, you know, having children is going to destroy your body’, or, you know, ‘it’s so expensive’ … And I want people to know that you can actually have it all. You just can’t have it all at the same time.”

Badenoch, the former business secretary and now the shadow housing secretary, was born in Wimbledon, southwest London, and is one of three children born to Nigerian parents. Her father was a GP, and her mother, Feyi Adegoke, was a professor of physiology. She spent much of her childhood in Lagos, in Nigeria, where she carried a machete to school. She described her upbringing as “very tough” despite coming from a middle-class family “with a car and a driver”.

The family had to dig their own borehole to get water “because one day the national water company just stopped supplying water” and were reliant on a generator for electricity.

Her first year in education was spent in a federal boarding school, which she described as a “very socialist construct” and pupils, they were expected to do manual labour.

“The government doesn’t provide you with stuff,” she said. “You have to come to school with your own stuff. So I had a hoe for planting and a machete [to cut the grass]. You also had to bring your own broom and your own mattress.”

Kemi with her grandfather in Nigeria in 1987

When she was a teenager, her father decided that she should come to Britain to secure a better future. At 16 she came to live with her mother’s best friend in Wimbledon, where she took a job at McDonald’s. She said last month that she “became working class” after taking up the role, which involved “flipping burgers” and cleaning toilets.

Taking on those who criticised her comments, she said: “I think people move up and down between classes. This old system of what class meant in the 19th century is not what it means today. Life changes and downward social mobility is something that I am very aware of and want to make sure doesn’t happen.”

Badenoch studied systems engineering at the University of Sussex and later got a law degree from Birkbeck, University of London. It was during her studies that she began to form her political views and “saw what left-wing was”. She described this as “ignorance” and a “lot of patronising attitudes”.

“I thought that many of the students were very entitled and did not actually know what life was like,” she said. “By this time, I had come from a developing country, I had been working at McDonald’s and I had met loads of sort of north London private school kids who all wanted to be special … with these trendy left-wing causes.”

In particular, she found the way they talked about Africa “very ignorant” and “like helpless people who needed … saviours to fix them”. She said: “I think Africans need to sort out Africa.”

Badenoch began her career in banking then held a senior management role at The Spectator magazine before winning her Saffron Walden seat in 2017.

She has since had a stellar political rise and entered the cabinet as international trade secretary under Liz Truss. This is her second tilt at the leadership, after being eliminated in the fourth round in the 2022 contest to replace Boris Johnson.

She said during her televised debate with Jenrick on Thursday that she did not need to talk about policies, because party members “know what I’m about”. However, her major pitch is to reform the state.

She said this was about “rewiring” some of the “stuff that is under the radar”, including Treasury rules and how people are appointed to the civil service. At the Conservative Party conference earlier this month she joked that 5 to 10 per cent of civil servants were “very bad” and “should be in prison”. She also said that about 10 per cent were “absolutely magnificent”.

In a riposte to her former mentor Michael Gove, who said during the Brexit referendum campaign that “people in this country have had enough of experts”, Badenoch said: “Many of them want to do a good job, but they just move from department to department … They don’t develop subject matter expertise and that, I think, is an issue. If they do develop subject matter expertise, they’re poached by the private sector who can pay a lot more … That for me is a sign of a broken system.”

Badenoch said that when she was a junior minister at the Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities, as it was then known, there was “no performance management”.

“I think that’s crazy. Everywhere I worked in the private sector had performance management,” she said. “I remember asking my department how many people had been sacked and we didn’t have any.”

She said her party now had the opportunity in opposition to wipe the slate clean and start doing things “properly”. That work will begin in her first day in the job as party leader if she defeats Jenrick. The results of the contest will be announced on November 2.

For now, she will spend the next fortnight crisscrossing the country attending hustings events in her battle for votes. While she is on the road, it will be business as usual for her husband, Hamish, an investment banker, with whom she co-parents their children.

“My husband does way more than I do because his job isn’t weird like mine is. He’s the one who’s in all the parents’ WhatsApp groups because I’m already in 5,000 parliamentary WhatsApp groups and I would just not see anything. He is the one who can work from home from time to time and do the parent teacher meetings.”

She added: “My spouse is making a sacrifice for me to do this. And so I owe him so much. I couldn’t do this without him. I’m very grateful for the support that he provides, but I think he’s also setting an example for a lot of men out there: support the women in your lives.”

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