Kemi Badenoch reveals how she SNITCHED on a fellow pupil for cheating in an exam - and it led to him being expelled from their school
The Tory leader recalled, when she was 'about 14 or 15', how she stood up during the middle of an exam and said: 'He's cheating, he's the one that's doing it.'
'That boy ended up getting expelled,' Mrs Badenoch admitted, adding: 'I didn't get praised for it.
'I was a relatively popular kid at school, and people said 'why did you do that, why would you do it?'. I said 'because he was doing the wrong thing'.'
The Conservative MP told the BBC that following the incident she was told 'You don't belong here, you don't know how to behave'.
'I've heard that all my life,' she continued. ''You don't follow the rules, you don't do what you're supposed to'.
''You're always sticking your head above the parapet, you're too direct, you tell the truth when you don't need to tell the truth when you should pipe down'.'
Mrs Badenoch was born in Britain but spent her childhood in Nigeria and the US before she returned to the UK at the age of 16.
The Tory leader admitted she was a 'swot' at school and also 'the tattle-tale in the class, getting people into trouble'.
'Even then I hated cheating,' she said. 'I wanted to be first in the class, I'd done all the work.
'And then there's some people who are copying notes - why should they get away with it?'
Elsewhere in the BBC interview, Mrs Badenoch revealed how the case of Austrian sex offender Josef Fritzl caused her to lose her faith in God.
She said she was 'never that religious' while growing up but 'believed there was a God' and 'would have defined myself as a Christian apologist'.
But this changed in 2008 when she read reports that Fritzl had imprisoned and repeatedly raped his daughter, Elisabeth, in his basement over 24 years.
Mrs Badenoch, whose maternal grandfather was a Methodist minister, said: 'I couldn't stop reading this story. And I read her account, how she prayed every day to be rescued.
'And I thought, I was praying for all sorts of stupid things and I was getting my prayers answered.
'I was praying to have good grades, my hair should grow longer, and I would pray for the bus to come on time so I wouldn't miss something.
'It's like, why were those prayers answered and not this woman's prayers? And it just, it was like someone blew out a candle.'
But Mrs Badenoch insisted that while she had 'rejected God', she had not rejected Christianity and remained a 'cultural Christian'.
She said she wanted to 'protect certain things because I think the world that we have in the UK is very much built on many Christian values'.
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BBC News
a few seconds ago
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Big Mags: The paedophile-hunting granny who built a heroin empire
In January 1997, long before the modern phenomena of online "paedophile hunters", a Scottish grandmother found overnight fame when she successfully drove a convicted child sex offender out of the Raploch housing estate in Stirling. Margaret 'Big Mags' Haney and her brand of mob justice transformed her into a matriarchal media of her most famous appearances was on the popular daytime TV show Kilroy where she was invited to discuss the 'paedophile panic' that was sweeping the county. Haney argued with the show's host, squabbled with other guests, and threatened two men in the audience, clearly wearing disguises, who had been convicted of abusing profile skyrocketed and in her new role as a self-styled anti-paedophile campaigner she began to pop up at protests across the country. 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Mark McGivern's newspaper launched their "Shop-A-Dealer" campaign that encouraged readers to anonymously tip off the biggest heroin dealers in their phones lit up, with many callers ringing up to put Big Mags in the frame, exposing her as the big boss of a drug dynasty that ran heroin out of their flats. McGivern remembers how Mags's status changed from celebrated to feared."She was a public figure, a community leader, quite a big heroin dealer, and she was a gangster," he journalist had a well-placed source who laid out to him the Haney drug operation, with Mags at the top, so he "scratched around" and witnessed family members selling drugs from the flats. McGivern even bought a couple of bags of heroin from Haney lieutenants as part of his investigation. 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Spectator
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