A British politician of Nigerian descent, Mrs Olukemi Olufunto Badenoch (nee Adegoke) is one of the contenders from the Conservative Party who are vying to become the next Prime Minister of the United Kingdom in the forthcoming September 5 election.
According to media reports, Mrs Badenoch who announced her intention to run in an Op-Ed published in the Times of London on Saturday, July 9, 2022, was one of the Ministers who resigned to protest former Prime Minister, Boris Johnson’s bad conduct.
“I’m putting myself forward in this leadership election because I want to tell the truth. It’s the truth that will set us free,” her Op-Ed reads in part.
Mrs Badenoch centres her campaign around tax cuts, low regulation, and attacking the UK’s net zero targets, saying “…too many policies like the net zero target (are) setup with no thoughts of effects on industries of the poorer parts of this country.”
“The consequence is simply to displace emissions to other countries, unilateral economic disarmament and that is why we need change,” she said.
Mrs Badenoch, 42, born to a Nigerian doctor father and university professor mother in Wimbledon, London, studied at the International School, Unilag before returning to the UK at age 16.
She studied Computer Systems Engineering at the University of Sussex; worked as a software engineer at Logica from where she went on to work at the Royal Bank of Scotland Group as a systems analyst before working as an associate director at Coutts and later as a director at The Spectator magazine.
She ventured into active politics in 2005 when she joined the Conservative Party at the age of 25. She contested in the 2010 general elections for the Dulwich and West Norwood constituency against Labour’s Tessa Jowell and came third.
In 2015, when Victoria Borwick resigned her seat on the London Assembly and Suella Fernandes, who had also been elected to the House of Commons declined to fill the vacancy, Mrs Badenoch was declared the new Assembly Member. She went on to retain her seat in the Assembly in the 2016 election.
She was elected as MP for the Saffron Walden constituency in the 2017 general election and was re-elected in 2019.
Mrs Badenoch is one of the five top contenders for the seat. Others are Rishi Sunak, Penny Mordaunt, Liz Truss, and Tom Tungedhat in that order.
She got married to her husband, Hamish Badenoch in 2012 and they have two children.
