Whenever international affairs are proving particularly ‘interesting’ there’s always some clown who pipes up with ‘Oh, if only women ruled the world – it would be so peaceful!’ But females can be every bit as keen on a ding-dong or a dust-up as men; in fact, I’d say that women who try to push the theory that we have a completely different political sensibility – saintlike and self-sacrificing and not prone to sins of the flesh like that Big Bad Boris – are often slithery, self-righteous snakes with a far more sinister agenda than many nakedly ambitious male politicians. But enough about Nicola Sturgeon. For as one door slams on the disgraced ex First Minister of Scotland, another one opens, for Kemi Badenoch.

But not quite open; perhaps, for now, just ajar? Mrs Badenoch is far too astute to nurse any desire to rush in and grab the poisoned chalice from Rishi Sunak, to the point that she displays irritation towards those ‘friends’ who are trying to push her into pole position. Nevertheless, the Times reported recently that:

‘Tory plotters believe that Kemi Badenoch is best placed to succeed Rishi Sunak if they can manage to oust him in the coming months. The business and trade secretary has accused the plotters of “stirring” and said that they need to “stop messing around and get behind the leader”. However, the Tory rebels believe that Badenoch is the only candidate on the right who stands a chance of uniting the party and selling their policy platform. Badenoch is perceived to have star quality: “Kemi has the X factor, she has the capacity to cut through and communicate. She can carry off the policy platform that’s being drawn up,” said an anonymous Tory MP.‘

Defiance is a big Badenoch thing

On the Laura Kuenssberg show last week there was great fun to be had when Kemi was in the studio at the same time as Nadine Dorries (though seated some way from her, and interviewed in a separate section of the programme) and couldn’t resist taking a pop at Dorries’ ghastly-sounding novel The Plot, after which the WhatsApp group which Badenoch and Michael ‘Gossip Girl’ Gove (now that’s a gang I’d join) belong to is alleged to be named – ‘The Evil Plotters’. There’s something attractively all-too-human about Badenoch; a feeling that she might lose her temper at any moment if she has to hear anymore of your ruddy nonsense, be it about Brexit or gender woo-woo. She is one of those vivid Tory women – along with Suella Braverman, Penny Mordaunt, Miriam Cates and even Dorries herself – who make the Labour lot look like the worst kind of prissy handmaidens imaginable.

Women can choose from several roles when they seek power; there’s Mother of the Nation (Golda Meir, Angela Merkel) or Warrior Woman (Margaret Thatcher, Indira Gandhi) or Uptight Older Sister (Hillary Clinton, Theresa May – not such a great choice, this one.) But the British Labour party, it seems, is only comfortable with women as caregivers and caretakers – literally, in the case of the able veteran MP Harriet Harman, the longest-ever continuously serving female MP, who was briefly ‘caretaker’ of the Labour party in 2015 while the men sorted it out among themselves.

In an unusual incidence of auto-gaslighting last week, Harman claimed on Times Radio that Labour women were too ‘subversive’ to get the top job:

‘You’re a subversive challenging force as a feminist in the Labour party. As a woman in the Tory party, you’re not frightening the men. You’re working in collusion with them on their terms and therefore it’s no problem for them to elect you.’

As Steerpike said, ‘Tell that to Mrs T and her challenge to the Conservative boys’ club of the 1970s.’

There’s nothing in the least ‘subversive’ about selling out your sisters in order to suck up to the cross-dressing community, the current crop of Labour women having subscribed wholesale to the lie that men can be women.

The trad Right-wing antipathy to uppity women has been passed to the Left, leaving the field clear for Mrs Badenoch next time around. I like to address her as that, as I liked to write ‘Mrs Thatcher’ – there’s something about a happily married woman making her way in politics (especially one with children: Mrs B has three, taking her youngest out in a pram as a newborn when campaigning for re-election to her Essex constituency when she was 39) which defies the sexist tropes about not Having It All. (A career and a home life: will we pesky females never stop asking for the moon?)

Kemi Badenoch on the steps of Downing Street (Credit: Getty Images)

Defiance is a big Badenoch thing, as seen in her magnificent maiden speech in the Commons after being elected MP for Saffron Walden in 2017, starting with ‘doing homework by candlelight because the state electricity board (in Nigeria) could not provide power…fetching water a mile away in heavy, rusty buckets because the nationalised water could not get water to flow from the tap’ and ending with praise for Brexit, which she called with a striking and defiant modernism ‘the greatest ever vote of confidence in the project of the United Kingdom.’

Kemi Adegoke was born in 1980; her father is a GP, her mother a professor of physiology who, when she needed obstetric care not available in Nigeria (‘I was unlucky enough to grow up under a military dictatorship which had very Left-wing policies – it’s not something I would wish on anyone’) came to a private maternity clinic in Wimbledon, where Kemi was born. She was brought up in Nigeria before returning alone to England at the age of 16, enrolling in a part-time A-Level course at a sixth-form college and working at McDonald’s – ‘I didn’t really have any money to live’ – before studying computer engineering at Sussex University and eventually coming to work for The Spectator in the digital department. She did a law degree in the evenings and joined the Conservative party ‘because it seemed interesting and fun and I wasn’t happy with the way the country was going’.

When she became the MP for Saffron Walden after Sir Alan Haselhurst retired after 40 years. she won with the biggest share of the ballot since 1935:

‘Essex is where my people are – they are straight-talking, no-nonsense people. They are good people, working hard – the mindset is very similar to my own.’

Such fighting talk from aspiring ethnic minority politicians not waiting for a white saviour (who can forget when Saint Jeremy smarmed ‘Only Labour can be trusted to unlock the talent of Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic people’?) will inevitably cause vapours in a Left which doesn’t actually see black citizens for who they are as individuals, but rather as units to be corralled and counted.

Kemi, on the other hand, has flipped burgers and done schoolwork by candlelight

Her treatment by the left-wing media has been predictably condescending, though they seem more scared of her than they were of Patel and Braverman in their pomp, and not quite as keen to have a go. The BBC, home of inclusion and diversity, has mis-captioned her as being Marsha de Cordova – par for the course for an institution to whom all black women MPs look the same, hence their also mistaking Florence Eshalomi for Abena Oppong-Asare and Marsha de Cordova (again) for Dawn Butler. (Dawn ’90 per cent Of Giraffes Are Gay’ Butler: how on earth could anyone, even the BBC, mistake anyone for The World’s Silliest Woman?).

Badenoch has reacted to the racially-based insults slung at her by Labour with dignity:

‘It is wrong to accuse those who argue for a different approach as being race traitors – it’s even more irresponsible, dangerously so, to call ethnic minority people Uncle Toms, coconuts or house slaves for daring to think differently.’

She’s not perfect; her back-pedalling on the promise to remove all EU legislation from UK law by the end of 2023 can seem like pragmatism or perfidy, depending on whether or not one is well-disposed towards her; I obviously am. I admire the way her natural gravitas is tempered by mischief; it wasn’t big or clever that, as a youngster, she hacked into Harriet Harman’s website and ‘changed all the stuff in there to say nice things about Tories’ – but I do find it funny.

We all know by now what will happen this year, and then for almost the rest of this decade – not so much the Roaring Twenties as the Warring Twenties, when civilisation appeared to be enthusiastically attempting to destroy itself by any means possible, with help from various proxies. Labour will get in, Labour will do badly, Labour will be up for re-election – and then Mrs Badenoch’s triumphal procession may begin. There’s no malice in Sunak – I’m sure he’s a great guy – but it was disastrous to make a man so rich, and with an immeasurably wealthy wife, leader of a party always so vulnerable to accusations of privilege, especially during a cost-of-living crisis. Kemi, on the other hand, has flipped burgers and done schoolwork by candlelight: when she told Laura K ‘I know what it’s like not to have enough money to look after yourself’ she is one of a tiny minority – in all parties, not just the Tories – who can say that without cracking up the audience.

I’ve always liked being British – our national character suits me, being bolshy, and being a boozer, and liking a laugh – but it feels somewhat wearisome to be one of our island race right now. You look at Sam Smith and Eddie Izzard and Gary ruddy Lineker and you kind of wonder what the point of it all was – all that Shakespeare and beating Hitler and Bobby Moore kissing the World Cup and getting Brexit. It sounds soppy, but when I see Kemi Badenoch’s beautiful face and hear her lovely voice – so completely free of doubt and fear in these doubting, fearful times – it kind of comes back to me. Yes, I know it can’t happen till Labour have been and gone, but don’t let’s leave it too long. Without an inspirational leader soon, we really will forget whatever it was that made us such a happy breed in the first place.