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 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 5 in all, peaking in Feb 2026 with 3.
Appearances
And after I joined, and also the social side, of course, and the fun, meet interesting people. I met my husband in the Conservative Party. So that's, you know.
Yes, yes. And that's how he met. And I just thought, this guy is always around and he's pretty cool. But it wasn't love at first sight or anything like that.
No, no, no, no. I think we were both actually quite suspicious of each other. And then the more we talked, the more we realized that we were, you know, we use the phrase brain twins, that we just think the same things on so much. And he had political ambitions himself. He did. And then he said to me one day, I think you're a lot better at this than I am. Do you think he's right?
Well, I'm now leading the party, so I think he's not. So I think he was right. But I wouldn't have been able to do this without his encouragement. I certainly wouldn't have been able to do it. And so if I hadn't met him, I probably I may have actually left because I wouldn't have been able to afford it. It's quite an expensive business being in politics. You take a pay cut.
So taking massive pay cards, but it was just, I needed something more than what my jobs in banking and engineering and software were giving me.
So I describe myself as a reluctant Brexiteer in the sense that I voted leave before I was an MP because I just couldn't see a way forward. We tried to negotiate and nothing was working. And we're giving this option. Leave or remain. My husband and I agreed on everything. He voted remain. I voted leave. And then I got into parliament and there was no plan.
And I thought this was completely insane. How can there be no plan? If you made everybody vote for something, you must have had a plan beforehand. And this is something that we keep doing wrong in UK politics. And the current prime minister has done the same thing of just talking, but not knowing how you're going to do something. We'll figure it out later.
So I come into parliament to a party that's gone backwards. It's lost seats. We're still in government because we're still the largest party, but there's no majority. And we're going round and round in circles. endlessly making concessions to the left. And that was the beginning of where it started going wrong. The first seven years were okay.
The second seven years were us making concessions to the left and compromising in ways that were not moving things forward. And we have paid for it now, seven years later, just endless sort of what I call managerialism. we moved into a space where it's no longer about what you believe in, but just being competent. And of course, competence is important.
But if there's no underlying philosophy, you're just administrators. There's no vision. You're not shaping the future. You're not showing the way. You're just managing the status quo. And managing the status quo at a time of Very high mass migration all over the world. It's not just affecting the UK. Rapid technological innovation, you know, social media, AI, all of that.
Soaring debts, as you described at the beginning. Low productivity. This is, you can't just manage that.
Yeah, low birth rate, exactly, falling birth rate. What are we going to do? And we would just come out with, well, we'll have a little bit more childcare there, or we'll cut tax by like a penny. And these things create huge swells of frustration. And it all spilled out this July, where we had tried but failed to cut immigration. We had tried to cut taxes.
Again, it not quite working because we just couldn't manage the balance sheet between how much we were spending and how much we needed to take in taxes.
The Conservatives lost. And... Labour won on a historic low share of the vote, 34%. I don't think any party has ever won with that number. But also, they won a landslide because of reform. So Labour are winning on a low share of the vote because people just want to kick us out. But the low share of the vote isn't just, you know, a majority of one.
It's a majority of a hundred and something, which is a landslide because reform were holding our legs. And they only won five seats despite having lots of votes spread around the country. And it was very much people voting to get conservatives out because they were just sick and tired of us, like what I call talking right and governing left, which annoys everybody.
Because the right doesn't get what it wants and the left doesn't like what it hears and doesn't recognize what you're doing. So they were sick of us. They were sick of the squabbling. There was a lot of infighting. And we would probably have lost anyway the natural fatigue that comes after 14 years in government. But the scale of the defeat was because of all of those other factors.
I think they probably would just have won. We would probably have had about 200 rather than 120. So they would have won, but we would have been a big opposition. I mean, I'm speculating. But if I look at the way the seats fell, maybe we would have had 250 and they'd have had 100.
He is very much a bureaucrat. And I think I don't even I don't even know if it's managerialism, because I don't think he even understands what the status quo is and is trying to manage it. What I see him as is and most of his cabinet is student politicians who have not grown up. So they are they are still very much at university. And the causes that they take over are different.
you know, student talking points.
Like, well, they're giving away these islands, the Chagos Islands, which is an absolute disgrace. And it's, I know that the reasoning behind it is, oh, it's anti-imperialism, but, There's an American defense base, Diego Garcia on there. We've bought this island many decades ago from Mauritius, but there's some international court judgments that have different rulings.
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