Kemi Badenoch says she no longer feels Nigerian and has given up passport for the country where she was brought up before coming to Britain aged 16
Although she was born in Wimbledon, Mrs Badenoch spent most of her childhood in Nigeria before returning to south London at the age of 16, after the country's economy collapsed in the 1990s, to continue her education.
She explained that she didn't 'identify' with the country, as she spent most of her life in the UK.
And when it came to her passport, she no longer had it up to date.
'I have not renewed my Nigerian passport, I think, not since the early 2000s,' she told the Rosebud podcast.
She revealed that she had to get a visa when her father died, describing the process as a 'big fandango.'
She said: '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.'
She also made it clear that she felt the Conservative Party was part of her 'extended family'.
The North West Essex MP said her early experiences in Nigeria influenced her political views, particularly 'why I don't like socialism.'
'I remember never quite feeling that I belonged there,' she added.
The Tory leader shared that the reason she returned to the UK as a teenager was because her parents thought she would have 'no future' in Nigeria.
And she said 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.'
Asked if she was made conscious of her 'blackness' after coming to Britain, she said: 'Never. And I think that this is one of the things that probably made me an outlier.
She continued: 'I had a couple of instances at school which now I look back and I think "Well, that might have been prejudice" but even then, when I talk about the soft bigotry of lower expectations, teachers saying "You don't need to go to all these fancy universities, just to this poly or this former poly".
'Some of it was just coming from what they thought was a good place, they thought they were being helpful or they were well-meaning.
'I don't think they were trying to disadvantage me. So I didn't feel that way.' But Mrs Badenoch, who moved permanently to the UK when she was 16 in 1996 because of economic turmoil in Nigeria, warned that things could get worse.
The mother-of-three said it would be a 'dereliction of duty' to leave a worse world to her children.
She added: 'I have mixed-race children. Making sure we keep a socially cohesive society, one where the colour of your skin doesn't matter any more than the colour of your eyes or your hair, is quite important. I think we've done such a brilliant job in the UK, and that's in danger of turning because of people on both extremes.
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