Kemi Badenoch’s election as leader of the Conservative party is a strikingly historic political and personal achievement. “To all intents and purposes, I am a first-generation immigrant,” she told the Commons in her 2017 maiden speech.
She was born British, as Olukemi Olufunto Adegoke, in a Wimbledon hospital in January 1980, before her parents took her home to Nigeria. Badenoch was among the last to benefit from the birthright citizenship rules which her heroine, Margaret Thatcher, would soon abolish in the 1981 British Nationality Act. She has compared her British passport to the golden ticket that let Charlie Bucket into Willy Wonka’s chocolate factory.
