I meet Kemi (everyone calls her Kemi) at a studio where she is being photographed for our cover. There are racks of clothes and about a dozen people standing around while she gets dressed behind a screen.
One of the standers-around introduces himself as her Spad and asks what this interview will be about. I say personal stuff rather than politics and he says, 'Oh, good', because he won't need to brief her.
Top, Reiss. Skirt, Cefinn. Boots, Dune
I ask someone else if she's arrived on time because she has a reputation for being notoriously unpunctual (she was half an hour late for her first Cabinet meeting), but he says that, on the contrary, she's arrived early. And then she steps out from the screen wearing a gold blouse and black skirt and gives a little twirl and everyone tells her she looks great.
Which, at 45, Kemi Badenoch does. Despite a runny nose, she's fit and toned (she works out with a personal trainer once a week). She likes the clothes she's modelling so much she asks to buy them.
When the shoot is finished, I ask if she enjoys doing all this – dressing up, posing for photos. 'No, I don't but it's all part of the job,' she replies. 'I used to be a tomboy when I was younger, but my mother always taught me that you have to dress appropriately for what you're doing, so I've taken that advice. I know it's important.'
Blazer, Nadine Merabi. Vest (just seen), Cefinn
But, she says, she prefers being interviewed. And, of course, she is great at it because she is so articulate. She talks in whole sentences, with no ums and errs, no ditherings or evasions. Perhaps for that reason I find her strangely daunting. She is so confident that I feel I belong to a lower species. Her heroine, Margaret Thatcher, had the same effect.
William Hague once said that being Leader of the Opposition is 'the worst job in politics', so how is Badenoch finding it?
'I don't think it's the worst job in politics. I'm not quite sure what the worst job in politics is. It's the most difficult job because you don't have the levers that you do in government, but people still judge you as if you are the government. And you've still got to keep a party of sometimes very disparate people moving in the same direction.
'But so far I'm enjoying it more than I thought I would. I'd prepared myself for four or five years of trial and tribulation but what's been really nice is that the party has rallied throughout. My friends have rallied around, and certainly my family. And I always find that when I've got family and friends around, everything's OK.'
Badenoch's friends include Tory politicians such as Alex Burghart and ex-MP Rachel Maclean, but also floating voters ('sometimes even left-leaning, although I am very much on the right'). She has some Nigerian friends, too, some from childhood, others British Nigerians 'who've lived here as long as I have but share the same heritage'.
Aged seven, in Nigeria with her grandfather, 1987
Her family comprises husband Hamish Badenoch, who works for Deutsche Bank, and their three children, aged between five and 11. They live in Wimbledon but also have a rented farmhouse in her constituency in the Essex countryside, where they stay at weekends.
Hamish does most of the childcare and cooking ('he loves cooking') because his job is more flexible than hers. She helps get the children up and off to school but then doesn't see them again that day because she doesn't arrive home until after ten. 'It's a very long day. But the compromise is that, weekends, I make sure the children see me, because if I'm not seeing them and I'm not around them it's not really worth it, is it?'
No – but she does have to interrupt family time at weekends for constituency events. Her mother still lives in Nigeria (her father died in 2022) but comes over periodically to visit the grandchildren. Hamish used to have political ambitions – they met when they were both campaigning in Dulwich and he later stood for a seat in Northern Ireland – but one of her first acts as an MP was to strike him off the 'approved candidates' list because, she jokes, he was a 'white public schoolboy'.
Still, he is her great support and sounding board: 'He is very clever and probably the most thoughtful person I know.' He is also a practising Roman Catholic (he was head boy at Ampleforth), so I wonder if he influenced her decision to vote against the Assisted Dying Bill.
Victorious at the 2024 Conservative leadership contest, with Robert Jenrick, who she beat
'No. He knows not to bring his religion into my decision-making. I voted against the bill because I thought it was a poor piece of legislation, and our first job as legislators is to make good law.'
Badenoch is 'not religious at all', but their children are being brought up Catholic. 'That was the agreement. I think it always happens in any couple – the person who feels more strongly about religion gets to make the choice. So the children are Catholic, yes.'
By chance, Badenoch and her husband were both born in the same hospital in Wimbledon. In his case, it was because his parents lived in the area; in hers it was more complicated. Her parents lived in Nigeria, but her mother came to London for a gynaecological consultation and was referred to Wimbledon, where she gave birth. This would be of crucial importance later, since it meant that Badenoch ended up with British citizenship.
The first language Badenoch spoke was Yoruba. While she was growing up in Nigeria the country went into a steep economic decline. She remembers periods when there was no electricity or hot water; when they had to fetch water from a borehole. And so, when she was 16, her parents decided to send her to England, to stay with a friend of her mother's in Morden, Southwest London.
That must have been scary, I suggest.
On the contrary, Badenoch replies – it was exciting. 'It wasn't a long-planned thing; it was very spontaneous. My mother said, 'Everything is getting worse here and my friend suggests you should stay with her in England. Do you want to?' I pretty much started packing. I didn't even wait for my final exam. England was calling me long before I got here. I had always watched British movies and BBC shows, and I thought Britain was an amazing place, a place where I wanted to be. And I never looked back.'
With husband Hamish at the state banquet for the Emir of Qatar at Buckingham Palace last month
She stayed with her mother's friend in Morden and went to a local sixth-form college to do her A-levels. But she also took a part-time job at McDonald's because she needed the money – and she could eat as many burgers as she wanted. It wasn't a Saturday job for pocket money, she stresses, it was a proper part-time job. As she was only spending half the week studying, though, it led to disappointing A-level results: two Bs, and a D for maths. 'Which, to this day, I'm very angry about because I was always good at maths,' she says, 'and I thought it would be a doddle.' It meant she couldn't go to her first choice of university, Warwick, to study computer engineering. Instead she went to Sussex, which she doesn't regret.
'I actually think that going there ended up making me partly who I am because of the experiences I had there.'
Badenoch has often said that the reason she became a Tory was because of all the 'stupid, middle-class-lefty, North London kids' she met at Sussex. 'It made me realise these are not my sort of people. I was very suspicious of them. They just seemed so coddled and unaware of what life was really like.'
As it happens, one of those middle-class white North London lefties at Sussex was my elder daughter, although she doesn't recall meeting Badenoch. But I'm quite shocked that just being annoyed by fellow students could be enough to make someone a Tory. It suggests a sort of underlying chippiness or resentment. Badenoch once said, 'The reason I went into politics was because I was angry. I was a very angry young person.'
Blazer and trousers, Nadine Merabi. Vest, Cefinn
What was she angry about? 'It was just, you know, anger at things not being done properly. I'm not a naturally resentful person. I don't experience the jealousies and the anger that other people experience. I'm happy for them. But there are some things that I have very violent reactions to: untruth, lies, dishonesty, cheating, fraud. Then the red mist descends.'
Ah yes, the red mist. Michael Ashcroft's 2024 book Blue Ambition: The Unauthorised Biography of Kemi Badenoch quotes several people saying, 'She'll cross the road to start a fight'. Even Fraser Nelson, who was briefly her boss when she worked as head of digital at The Spectator and remains a great fan, said that she had 'a weakness for street-fighting'. Is that something she should try to tone down?
'Well, I don't like a fight. But I'm not afraid of a fight if it's the right thing to do. And many of those people who say, 'Oh, she's rude, she's abrasive', don't say what they had done to elicit my response.'
I try to provoke her a couple of times, but don't see any flash of the red mist.
A story in The Times in 2023 reported that she fell out with Michael Gove, who'd been her great mentor, because he had an affair with a friend of hers that led to divorce. Ashcroft, the biographer, hints that she must have leaked the story to The Times. 'No, no. I would never do that,' Badenoch counters. 'Because it would have hurt my friend. But people could see that a falling-out had occurred, and they would ask what happened so I would tell them. And eventually the papers found out.'
What newspapers does she read?
'The news comes to me now. I don't have time to read anything. My office just tends to tell me what's happening because I'm in meetings all the time. So that's a bit frustrating because I worry that I'm missing things. But when you become leader, you get cut off from so much. People assume you know what's happening but you're actually knowing less because you're busier than ever and you need people to tell you what's going on.' She relies mainly on her husband to keep her posted.
Badenoch has often said that she hates identity politics – and especially things like Black Lives Matter. If she does self-identify, she says, it's as a woman rather than a black woman. 'I think being female and being a woman is more visceral for me than the ethnicity or the religion or lack of it or where I grew up. I will always have something in common with every woman that I meet.'
Mmm – except that I think most women would want to spend more time with their children. Does she have any areas of weakness? 'Oh, of course. Everybody does. And sometimes even your strengths become your weaknesses. People often can't tell the difference between confidence and arrogance. And I think this is actually more difficult for women, because we're meant to be more emollient.
'I have a very high threshold for what I consider a stressful incident. So when people say, 'She's rude', I wouldn't have considered it rude if it was said to me. I treat people the way that I would treat myself. But now I'm realising that I can't do that because I'm not like everybody else. I am actually an outlier. I have thicker skin, so I have to learn to mellow myself for people who don't have the hide of a rhino.'
I think she does. I think she needs to tone down some of her self-belief, which can come across as arrogance. But just as she has learnt to master punctuality, and posing for photos, she will no doubt succeed. She is very, very determined to become Prime Minister.
Picture director: Ester Malloy.
Fashion Director: Sophie Dearden-Howell.
Make-up: Stacy Wodu using Nars and Lisa Eldridge.
Images: Rex, Aaron Chown/PA Wire