Kemi Badenoch says she does not feel Nigerian and no longer has passport
When the country's economy collapsed in the 1990s, her parents took advantage of her British passport to get her out, sending her at the age of 16 to live with a family friend in south London to continue her education.
She said she had not renewed her Nigerian passport in two decades in an interview with the Rosebud podcast.
'I have not renewed my Nigerian passport, I think, not since the early 2000s.
'I don't identify with it any more, most of my life has been in the UK and I've just never felt the need to.'
She said she had to get a visa to visit the country when her father died, which she described as a 'big fandango'.
'I'm Nigerian through ancestry, by birth, despite not being born there because of my parents… but by identity I'm not really.
'I know the country very well, I have a lot of family there, and I'm very interested in what happens there.
'But home is where my now family is, and my now family is my children, it's my husband and my brother and his children, in-laws. The Conservative party is very much part of my family – my extended family, I call it,' she said.
The North West Essex MP said her early experiences in Nigeria shaped her political outlook, including 'why I don't like socialism'.
'And I remember never quite feeling that I belonged there,' she added.
The Tory leader said the reason she returned to the UK as a teenager was a 'a very sad one'.
'It was that my parents thought: 'There is no future for you in this country'.'
She has not experienced racial prejudice in Britain 'in any meaningful form', she said.
'I knew I was going to a place where I would look different to everybody, and I didn't think that that was odd,' she said.
'What I found actually quite interesting was that people didn't treat me differently, and it's why I'm so quick to defend the UK whenever there are accusations of racism.'
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Daily Mirror
2 hours ago
- Daily Mirror
Nigel Farage 'fanning flames of hatred' with 'dangerous' claims of 'cover-up'
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Mr Farage was accused of stoking tensions after posting a provocative video on social media in the wake of the stabbings questioning 'whether the truth is being held from us'. It triggered mass fury from politicians and campaigners, including from Brendan Cox, the wife of murdered MP Jo Cox, who at the time branded Mr Farage "Tommy Robinson in a suit". Asked at an event in central London whether police should release the names, addresses and immigration status of all people after they have been charged with an offence, Mr Farage said on Monday: "What caused unrest on our streets after Southport last year was us not being told the status of the attacker. That led to crazy conspiracy theories spreading online." Pressed on whether police should be obliged to publish details of someone, Mr Farage said: "I absolutely think that they should." Mr Cox told The Mirror on Monday: 'Farage got the riots badly wrong last year. 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Lib Dem deputy leader Daisy Cooper said: 'Victims must be at the heart of how all such cases are handled, whilst transparency and building public trust in our institutions is also important. But it's pretty rich to hear warnings of a febrile atmosphere from the very person fanning the flames. We are a nation of laws and decency, not hate and lawlessness.' Joe Mulhall, director of research at campaign group Hope not Hate, warned the 'anger and tension' seen in last summer's disorder had not gone away. He told The Mirror: 'In the right conditions, it could explode again. 'And I think it's extraordinarily dangerous, and that's why now is the sort of time when you expect your politicians to behave responsibly, not to try and exacerbate those tensions and create more anger for their own political desires.' Sabby Dhalu, Stand up to Racism's co-convenor, said: 'When most sensible people in positions of authority are thinking how they can prevent a repeat of last year's racist riots, Nigel Farage gets busy doing exactly what he did last year. 'That is stoking up tensions, implying there's been a cover-up, hoping to win votes on the back of this. Him and his are not fit to be anywhere near power.' On Monday, Mr Farage held an hour-long press conference in Westminster as part of Reform UK's 'Lawless Britain' campaign. He said there was 'rising public anger out there in the country', referring to recent protests outside hotels housing asylum seekers across the country. He said the issue was now becoming 'very much about the safety of women and children'. "There is certainly rising public anger out there in the country," he said. "As you can see, the number of protests that are taking place outside migrant hotels, up and down the country is indeed evidence of that. 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The Herald Scotland
2 hours ago
- The Herald Scotland
John Curtice: SNP majority in 2026 ‘extremely unlikely'
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The Independent
4 hours ago
- The Independent
Why has Kemi Badenoch fallen out with Liz Truss?
Dearie me, they're at it again. Former Tory leader Liz Truss and current Tory leader Kemi Badenoch are involved in another nasty spat, mainly about the infamous mini-Budget introduced by then Prime Minister Truss in September 2022. Badenoch has invoked that calamitous – and deeply Conservative – fiscal event in an otherwise routine attack on the government. Truss, ever ready to defend her record, because no one else will, has hit back and told Badenoch she's wrong and needs to do some more thinking, a particularly hurtful jibe when Badenoch thinks herself one of the brainier kids in the Westminster playground. Amusing and mildly diverting as it may be, this minor row also tells us some much bigger things about the Tory dilemma. What did Badenoch say? That Labour is even more incompetent than Truss was: 'For all their mocking of Liz Truss, Keir Starmer and Rachel Reeves have not learnt the lessons of the mini-Budget and are making even bigger mistakes. They continue to borrow more and more, unable and unwilling to make the spending cuts needed to balance the books.' Is that new? Not really. Only a few weeks ago, the shadow chancellor, Mel Stride, evicted from ministerial office by Liz Truss when she formed her short-lived government, laid into the mini-Budget and apologised for it. Badenoch, meanwhile, has said she doesn't know whether Truss is still in the Conservative Party, and implied she doesn't really care either way. She's long let it be known she'd prefer Truss to just go quiet for a while. Badenoch has also been disobliging about the Sunak administration 'talking right but acting left'. But Sunak, like Johnson, May and Cameron, has, so far, preferred to ignore the present controversies and policy shifts, such as Badenoch's 'net-zero sceptic' stance. What's the Truss defence? The usual – her supposedly brilliant plan to turbocharge the British economy was thwarted by a terrible econo-bureaucratic blob and those, to the visionary Truss, idiots at the Bank of England. But increasingly she is having to adapt her line because of attacks from her own party (if she is indeed still in it), which means slagging off the administrations that came before her – Cameron, May, Johnson – and after, Sunak and now Badenoch's performance as leader of the opposition: 'It is disappointing that instead of serious thinking like this, Kemi Badenoch is instead repeating spurious narratives. I suspect she is doing this to divert from the real failures of 14 years of Conservative government in which her supporters are particularly implicated.' Er... weren't they both members of these dreadful governments? Yes. Truss continuously from 2012 to her ousting in 2022, and Badenoch from 2019 to 2024. Indeed, it was Truss who promoted Badenoch to the cabinet as international trade secretary. Neither showed much dissent, publicly or privately. Why are they scrapping? Neither wants to take responsibility for their own failures as a party leader, and that can inevitably lead to blame throwing for their disastrous showing at the election, and subsequently. But all politicians in all parties who find themselves thrashed by the voters are faced with this excruciating dilemma as they enter the wilderness of life in opposition: Do they denounce the record and policies of the government they were apparently happy to be a part of? Or do they defend their record instead? Do they agree with the voters' verdict or not? And if they want to, or have to, admit 'mistakes', are they going to be big or smaller ones? How to play it? By ear – there are no hard rules. Back in the 1970s, Margaret Thatcher, as leader of the opposition, did well out of renouncing most of what the Heath government had done because it ended in such chaos, and Thatcher was (like Badenoch today) a relatively junior cabinet member who could claim some innocence. In due course, because public opinion had shifted during the Blair years, David Cameron found that he'd have to criticise Thatcher herself, so he declared that 'there is such a thing as society' and told his fractious party to 'stop banging on about Europe'. Ed Miliband, after Labour's defeat in 2010, never seemed able to make up his mind about whether the Brown administration (in which he served) had failed, and, if so, how and why. Try as he might, Nick Clegg could never grovel sufficiently for what he did on tuition fees in the coalition government, and the Lib Dems were so punished at the 2015 general election that they were left with eight MPs compared to the 56 elected in 2010. At the moment, the Conservative-led government of 2010 to 2024 has few friends and many critics, the most vociferous being some of its leading lights. In this respect, the party is behaving more like Labour traditionally does after a defeat. Thus, after the 1974-79 Labour government fell from power, it was attacked by the Bennites on the Labour left for being too right-wing, and by the social democrats on the right for being too left-wing. Eventually, the long passage of time made arguments about pay policy, union power and unilateralism irrelevant. One day, when people have forgotten who Truss and Badenoch were, they may be ready to give the Tories a hearing. But, with Farage on their right flank, with no qualms about slagging off the last government, the Conservatives may not have the luxury of time to settle their differences and focus their attacks on him.
