The London Assembly has long been a breeding ground for MPs: former Assembly members (AMs) now in the Commons include current and former foreign secretaries David Lammy and James Cleverley, 1922 committee chair Bob Blackman and more recent additions Gareth Bacon, Florence Eshalomi, Sian Berry and Peter Fortune. None have become so prominent, though, as Kemi Badenoch is now
The new leader of the Conservative Party and His Majesty’s Opposition had a relatively brief Assembly stint, from September 2015 until June 2017, when she left to take up her Saffron Walden parliamentary seat (since succeed by North West Essex). It was, however, a spell long enough to divide opinion – combative and punchy, or rude and contrary, according to some who witnessed her at City Hall, and at pains even then, as one said, “to argue strongly against anything that she saw as woke”.
Badenoch’s sights had long been set on Parliament without success before she entered City Hall. She’d fought and lost to Tessa Jowell in Dulwich & West Norwood in 2010. She’d missed out on selection in Banbury in 2014 and Eddisbury in 2015. By fortuitous irony, it was the victories of others in the May 2015 general election that saw her get on to the Assembly, her first political position (she has never served as councillor).
Victoria Borwick, a London-wide list member of the Assembly, resigned after winning the Kensington parliamentary seat. Suella Braverman, who as next in line on the Tory candidate list would otherwise have replaced Borwick at City Hall, had won a Commons seat too, meaning the vacant Assembly place instead went automatically to Badenoch, who had been number five on the list for the Assembly elections of 2012.
She made her mark immediately, quizzing the then-Mayor Boris Johnson over the police response to an “anti-gentrification” protest outside the Cereal Killer Café in Shoreditch. Cue Johnson fulminating against “bourgeois, lefty, nose-ringed yuppies”. But Badenoch took a more serious tone, pointing out that the protestors had smashed windows, injured a police officer and, “most offensive to the Muslim and Jewish residents in Tower Hamlets – they were carrying pigs’ heads”. (Coverage at the time suggested these were actually pig masks).
Interestingly, she went on to compare the treatment of “white and middle class” protestors with the tougher treatment of those arrested during the 2011 London riots, who she said were “young, relatively working-class and poor”, including a “high proportion” of ethnic minorities. “Why is it that they can get away with criminal damage that young black people doing exactly the same thing get strict sentences for?” she asked.
Badenoch also compiled a report on male rape in the capital, prompting Mayor to provide £78,000 funding to male rape charity Survivors UK, and a second on rogue landlords failing to carry out urgent repairs, recommending “common-sense and regulation-lite” measures. “I was delighted to have Kemi in the group,” Bacon, now Conservative MP for Orpington, who served with her at City Hall, tells On London. “I liked her style. She is punchy, combative, like Margaret Thatcher.”
Others weren’t so impressed, suggesting Badenoch was uninterested in other parties’ views or in the cross-party scrutiny work generally seen on the Assembly’s committees. Rude and dismissive was one view of her. Doing whatever she wanted rather than working as a team was another.
Bacon disagrees. “City Hall is quite left wing, and the other women members assumed that if you were a woman – a black woman with braids, too – you would be part of the sisterhood. But Kemi is clear what she believes and will defend her position,” he says.
The Tory selection committee for the 2016 London Assembly election shared his enthusiasm. She was promoted to top place on her party’s Londonwide candidate list, guaranteeing her a seat. Bacon, by that time leader of the Tory group, appointed her as his hard-hitting deputy.
Badenoch went straight into battle against the new Mayor, Sadiq Khan, notably urging him to toughen up the Met’s response to the displaying of Hezbollah flags at a pro-Palestine rally. “The Mayor has promised a ‘zero tolerance approach to anti-Semitism’, and I will be urging him to take these flags off London’s streets,” she said. Operational matters were for the Met, replied Khan, but he agreed un conciliatory style that there was a “line to be drawn”.
But that battle was short-lived. Badenoch was expecting her second child. She is said to have quit her job at the Spectator magazine rather than inconvenience her employer, but, from September 2016, took effective paid leave from the Assembly, which has no formal maternity arrangements for members, but allows them to continue drawing their salaries unless they miss meetings for an unbroken six months. She then won her Commons seat at the snap election of summer 2017.
“She’d just started to come back when the election was called,” said Bacon. “I was a bit crestfallen. I would have very much enjoyed Kemi in full sail against Sadiq. Full fat Kemi would have been very good.” It is now an experience awaiting us all.
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Starmer and Badenoch has the potential to be the Gladstone and Disraeli of the mid-21st century. They’re both young and ethical enough to hang in there for the next 20 years. They could make politics a lot more interesting. That’s if the Tory Party doesn’t just get washed away in the meantime.