Kemi Badenoch, the British Conservative Party leader, is trying to insinuate herself into a club that does not want her as a member. No, I am not alluding to the Conservative Club, which has many chapters across Britain. To be sure, a number of these politically incestuous clubs would not accept her as a member. She became the leader of the Tories thanks to complex internecine rifts and disarray within her party. For all her extravagant attempts at foisting her sense of belonging on everyone, Kemi is as British as Rishi Sunak or Boris Johnson, who, by the way, was born in New York.
The club Kemi is intent on joining is neither that of Britishness nor even Englishness (after all, she was born in England), but that of 'whiteness' or Europeanness. And she's not just appealing to the mainstream; she has been brazenly playing to the jerks’ gallery of white supremacists and racists. She harps on racist talking points like the hierarchy of cultures and humans – 'lesser culture' over against 'higher culture', 'civilised people' vs ‘peasants and sub-communities’, etc.
Her negative references to Nigeria are not as off-the-cuff as some might think. It is an orchestrated, barely disguised game of racial and cultural one-upmanship. She tells her target audience: see how rotten and barbarous Nigeria is, compared to ‘our’ beloved, supercivilised Britain. She is getting away with the disingenuous ruse for a number of reasons. She carries a Nigerian passport and had spent some of her early years in Nigeria. Her critique of the Nigerian polity, even though exaggerated and cynical, has a ring of half-truth about it. Thirdly, she may have calculated on the echo-chamber syndrome among some Nigerians, on which her views would bounce off and resonate: 'oh, she's telling the truth about the state of Nigeria.' And that is all there is to it.
Of course, the cobbled-up space called Nigeria is indeed in a sorry state, owing to a long relay of dreadful leaders, including the current vice president, who scolded Kemi and suggested that she drop her Yoruba name. I have no time for the reprobate Nigerian ruling class, so I no longer waste any breath on them. Even then, if I were called upon to speak about Britain, as a private British citizen, I would not start babbling about Nigeria, still less about Nigerian politicians. Kemi is the British Leader of the Opposition and has absolutely no business denigrating another country, whether she carries the country's passport or not. It is undiplomatic and in bad taste.
Kemi is more of a glib panderer than an honest truth-teller. It is not so much about the truth or untruth of what she says about Nigeria but its pointlessness and vicious point-scoring. She is a heavy-handed political climber, and all she has done is use Nigeria as a foil for her rose-coloured, over-romanticised view of the 'greatness' of Britain. She is asked what she thinks about the British police and she pivots straight to how the Nigerian police officers stole her brother's shoes. This is not just unnecessary, but it is also infantile and pettish.
Dragging Nigeria into British political topicalities is the very definition of dishonesty. It is a pushy, validation-seeking ruse; it's all about showing her audience that she is eternally grateful and beholden to them for allowing her to inhale their 'civilised' ozone. It is indeed an explicit appeal to the racist and white-supremacist wing of her party.
Recently, Kemi tried to live up to her punned marital name, Bad-Enoch – in other words, a misbegotten heir to racist and xenophobic Enoch Powell. She should be embarrassed by this comparison, but being utterly lacking in self-awareness, she has failed to see the irony of her situation.
Recently, she came out with some batshit anti-immigration proposals, which are not worth repeating here. With her characteristic smugness, she seems to rejoice in channelling the anti-immigrant hysteria in a country whose recent imperial history makes it a fair destination for a quarter of the world’s population. A few days ago, Kemi again tried to outdo herself by submitting that Palestinians are less human than Ukrainians, so they should not have the right of political asylum in the UK.
There is no doubt that Kemi is proud a member of the vile Trump Fan Club – she is a Trumpette who conveniently reckons without the fact that she would, if she were American, have been a target of Trump's and Musk's DEI witch-hunt.
Kemi’s Thatcheresque pose often falls flat, and we should not forget that Thatcher herself was a class-hopping posturer. Kemi wants to be seen as the latest incarnation of an unshifting, uncompromising iron lady. I can't imagine her having the forethought to know that she will suffer a fate worse than Thatcher's because she will not be prime minister before she is eased out of her over-big boots.
Kemi wishes to be seen as a moral exception to prejudiced presumptions of her right-wing fellow travellers, but at best, she has made herself out as the idiot referent of racists and supremacists – a signifier of unrequited racial foot-washing. At worst, she is a bad-faith actor who blurs the line between a lack of sense of proportion and a bankruptcy of common sense. She has only succeeded in showing herself up as white supremacists' performing monkey, which is why her arrogance jars and is laughable.
If Kemi is thinking of Englishing her name, she may try Stephanie – witness Stephen, the slimy, deplorable house negro in Tarantino’s ‘Django Unchained.’ That is the way she comes across. How does she see herself? A ‘human stain’, a la Philip Roth?
‘Psychoanalysing Kemi’ might be a good topic in a decolonial classroom, but decades ago, Frantz Fanon had done that in ‘Black Skin White Masks.’
