The only time I have met Kemi Badenoch was in a television studio a few months ago when she shamed me into a stumbling apology. We were part of a panel discussing her plan to bar transgender people from entering female-only spaces. And the then equalities minister had, for once, gone out of her way to emphasise the need for a reasoned debate on this bitterly contested issue. So how, I asked, could she then justify a Conservative advert that day claiming Keir Starmer didn’t know “what a woman is”?
Badenoch replied with words that would chill the blood of anyone with vaguely progressive instincts. “Please don’t point at me like that, I find it unnecessarily aggressive,” she said. “Err … sorry,” I muttered, “there are some strong feelings on this.” Fair enough. Middle-aged white men like me really should have learned by now to keep their fingers under control.
My purpose in recalling this slightly painful experience now is because there has been some excited chatter that the “forthright” new Tory leader will cause similar discomfort for Starmer.
Even though the prime minister has never really been the finger-jabbing type, his new opponent is not averse to using her gender and ethnicity to invalidate other opinions in a fashion more often associated with the “woke” identity politics she usually professes to despise. Earlier this year, when the actor David Tennant said he wanted her to “shut up” on transgender issues, Badenoch responded that it wasn’t a good look for “a rich, lefty, white male celebrity” to attack “the only Black woman in government”. Last month, she claimed this identity alone would make her “Labour’s worst nightmare” if elected leader. “They want to paint people on the right as being prejudiced, and they know that with me there, they will be unable to make that case convincingly.”
Her arrival as leader of the opposition has coincided with a couple of fresh allegations about Starmer. In September, the Canterbury MP, Rosie Duffield, quit the Labour party with a long list of grievances that included Starmer having some sort of “problem with women”. More recently, leaked WhatsApp messages from MPs have suggested he has a “blind spot” on race because his appointments to Downing Street have so far not included any senior Black advisers.
Such accusations are easier to fling around than refute. For what it’s worth, however, I suspect it will be difficult to make this type of mud stick on Starmer. He has a select group of old friends from outside politics who are generally better sources about his values than anyone running around Westminster. Although football and the pub (or watching football in a pub) dominate vast tracts of his hinterland, there’s none of that casual sexism or racism often associated with such pastimes. “That’s just not in him,” says one of his most regular companions.
His tight circle of friends also includes Indra Sharma, who he first met at grammar school four and a half decades ago. “As a half-Asian girl, I suppose I stood out a bit in Surrey during the 1970s,” she says, “but Keir never showed anything except respect to me and my father.” Sharma has fond memories of him taking her “dodgy early boyfriend” aside one night so that the future prime minister could explain exactly how he should behave. “That’s what Keir’s like and how he was brought up,” she adds.
None of which, of course, gives Starmer a free pass on such issues. He remains sensitive to repeated claims that his Downing Street team is a “boys’ club”, while aides say he will also want to appoint more people of colour in coming months. But the most important difference between him and Badenoch is not so much about race and gender, or even her rightwing views, as their sharply contrasting approach to big political choices.
At her first outing in the House of Commons last week, Badenoch found no fewer than five ways of praising Donald Trump’s triumph in the US presidential election as she sought to embarrass Britain’s left-of-centre prime minister. Only in her sixth and final question did she mention the government’s plan to make the richest landowners pay more inheritance tax that has so galvanised Tory opposition to the budget.
At the weekend, she wrote an article saying a new Trump presidency represented a “golden opportunity” to approve a US-UK trade deal negotiated the last time he was in the White House. Apparently, this treaty was “oven ready” (yes, that again) and, in her view, preferable to restoring links with the EU. The most obvious problem with this is that no such US trade deal has ever existed. One of the reasons it was resisted before, including by Badenoch’s former mentor Michael Gove when he was environment secretary, is that imports of the US’s chlorinated chicken or hormone-injected beef would wreck Britain’s livestock industry and make mincemeat of all those family farms for which Conservatives say they care so deeply.
Their spiky new leader undoubtedly has a talent for controversy, but it has meant she has already plunged in to pick a side on a potentially titanic choice for Britain’s future between the US or Europe. Starmer, through experience and temperament, is not so reckless. Although he doesn’t underestimate Badenoch, the prime minister will bide his time before deciding how best to tackle both her and any trade deal with Trump. His lawyerly approach will, according to one well placed government figure, be “evidence first rather than America first”.
The most important factor now in Britain’s politics is less likely to be Badenoch’s success last week in becoming the first Black woman to lead a major political party. Instead, it is about Kamala Harris’s failure to become the US’s first Black female president and the still unfolding consequences of Trump’s victory.
Tom Baldwin is the author of Keir Starmer, The Biography
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