Kemi Badenoch

speaker

549 appearances 8 recordings 5 series first heard Dec 2024 last heard 9 Jun

Kemi Badenoch’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 5 in all, peaking in Feb 2026 with 3.

Appearances

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The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast · 522. The New Conservative Party | Kemi Badenoch · 17 Feb 2025 podcast

And between COVID and high house prices and so on, there's so much that has created despair. And I remember having a conversation with Pierre Poliev about this. He's my kindred spirit, by the way. I love him. He's fantastic. And, you know, he is six months older than me. And we see these things in the same way. We have to give people hope.

And that is really, I think, maybe the difference between me and the other party leaders, that I'm thinking very much about the future and giving people hope, not just about today or yesterday.

Honestly with Bari Weiss · Is Kemi Badenoch the Next Margaret Thatcher? · 12 Dec 2024 podcast

Thank you, Barry. It's lovely to be here.

So it certainly shaped my character, but my family shaped my character a lot more. I was born into a relatively wealthy family and I was born in January 1980. This is just as the oil boom is taking off in the country in the 70s. Everybody's got lots of money and my family is doing well, partly because of that. And

No, no. But he was a doctor who had lots of oil company patients. And he worked for them to some extent as well. They would send their patients to him. So he didn't work for the companies, but he treated them and got paid very well. And my grandmother, who... grew up never learning how to read or write, was poor. She made a lot of money from trading.

So she was my initial inspiration, this woman who could never read or write, but she made so much money, she sent some of her children to the US to study, paid all the fees, not my dad, but others. And they're still here. I still have family here because of what she did back in the 60s.

But what really shaped me was watching the decline of the family wealth because of terrible economic policies that the country was having. And I tell people that it was socialism and they say, oh, it wasn't socialism. It was just a military dictatorship. And this is one of the things which I referenced in the speech that I gave in Washington a couple of days ago.

The people keep saying, oh, it's not socialism because it doesn't call itself that. But it is. It was the government owning everything, deciding which businesses would run and which ones wouldn't run by decree. It was the government choosing which school you would go to for secondary school. I wasn't able to pick the school. The government decided you will go to this school.

And sometimes they send people thousands of miles away. And one day, for example, the water just stopped running. And it was just a state run water company just couldn't cope. And we ended up having to dig a borehole and get our own water. But for a long period, I had to go out fetch water. So I tell people that I know what it is like to be wealthy and also to not have any money to be poor.

By the time I moved to the UK in 1996, there was virtually nothing left, hyperinflation and so on. And my dad gave me the equivalent of what was his last hundred pounds and said, you know, good luck, because I really wanted to come back to the UK and I had a British passport. So all of those experiences have shaped my view of the world that even if you're wealthy, things can disappear.

And you have to work very hard to maintain not just your family, but also your country. Otherwise, it'll degrade. Things aren't always going to be the way they are. You've got to make sure that you culture and cultivate what is good about your society or you will lose it.

My family was not very political. You know, if you're growing up or if you're living, I should say, in a military dictatorship, there's no politics. It's just it's soldiers. So it doesn't really, you know, it doesn't really come into it. And there wasn't a very vibrant sort of academic spirit. atmosphere in certain places where you would debate Marxism or socialism.

My parents were academics, but they were scientists. My parents were doctors. And my mother taught at university. I never saw that sort of thing. So the politics was very social and cultural. This is how you behave. This is what's normal. This is what you're expected to do. And it was very much about standards and excellence, because it's a very competitive country.

There are only so many university places You have to do well or you will fail. And you look out the window and there are loads of examples of people who either failed or never had a chance in the first place. So the risk is very clear to you. There's no social security. There's no benefit system. There's no safety net. Safety net is only family.

So people have lots of children because that's what looks after you when you get old. And that makes a difference. On Margaret Thatcher, everybody knew. who she was, you know, Margaret Thatcher, Michael Jackson, just a handful of icons that transcended. And she was one of them. I don't know what my parents thought of her beyond the fact that everybody called her the Iron Lady.

But I do remember when I was at school, and you know, this is still a very patriarchal society and not not in the

funny way that people in the West talk about the patriarchy, you know, I'm talking about proper, actual, like the real, yeah, the real, the real way, you know, men marrying lots of wives, girls not being allowed to go to school, like real, real patriarchy, not someone, you know, didn't open a door for me or did open a door and I didn't like it.

And you'd have boys make very derogatory comments about girls. And this was still in a relatively, you know, sort of well-educated, progressive, relatively progressive sort of environment. They say, women's place is in the kitchen. And girls shouldn't, why are you bothering doing this? You know, you're only going to get married and have children.

And you would just say two words to them, Margaret Thatcher, and it just shut them up. She was the most powerful woman in the world. Certainly she felt like the most powerful person in the world for a long time. And everyone knew who she was.

But I did have somewhere to stay. So my mother had a friend who I was going to stay with. So it wasn't like they gave me money and then I stayed in a homeless shelter. I had a roof over my head, but I had to look after myself. And so I had to get a job. And that was at McDonald's. And did you do the fries like Kamala Harris did?

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