𝓤𝓷𝓲𝓽𝓮𝓭 𝓝𝓮𝔀𝓼

Kemi Badenoch will lead her party into future elections as a taboo-breaking Tory – a common-sense crusader who loathes identity politics. In the latest sign that she is unafraid of controversy, she declared that the “Nottingham murders, the Southport attack, the Manchester Arena bombings and the rape gangs” could have all have been stopped if people who were afraid of being labelled racist had intervened.

“Race is not the cause of those crimes, but it is the reason these crimes are not being prevented,” she told a gathering at the Institute for Government. Wimbledon-born Mrs Badenoch, 46, who spent her childhood in Nigeria and the United States before returning to the United Kingdom as a teenager, is a foe of identity politics, believing it threatens lives and divides society.

Her pledge to axe the public sector equality duty is her latest proposal to reboot Britain. For her, this is about saving a country in which she has risen to become the leader of the party of Churchill and Disraeli.

“Modern Britain is the least racist country on earth,” she said. “I speak from experience. As a child, I lived on three different continents …

“There is nowhere else on Earth that I would be doing the job that I’m doing right now as a black woman in a majority-white country. It is because we are not racist, because we care so much about equality, that we have overcorrected and actually brought in rules that are actually discriminatory.”

The Conservatives face unprecedented competition on the Right from Nigel Farage’s Reform UK. Mrs Badenoch is clearly betting that she can convince voters she shares their concerns but also offers credible solutions.

Claiming that “confidence in our institutions is now collapsing,” she said: “When people can see, as we do in my own constituency, Gypsy, Roma, and Traveller communities breaking laws that no one else would get away with; when rapists are being put in women’s prisons because the justice system prioritises the protected characteristic of gender reassignment over women’s privacy, dignity, and safety; when people see pro-Palestinian marchers chanting slogans that others would be sent to jail for tweeting; people will believe in two-tier policing when they see this.”

She also criticised on the Macpherson report which followed the murder of Stephen Lawrence, claiming it enshrined the principle that a crime is racist if “it is perceived as racist by the victim or any other person”.

Mrs Badenoch is striking a very different to tone to some of her predecessors. It will be decade next month since Theresa May, in her first statement as prime minister, described how it was a “burning injustice” that “if you’re black, you’re treated more harshly by the criminal justice system than if you’re white”.

She told the Express she wished Mrs May “had spoken to me about this at the time because I might have framed some of what she said differently”. She accepts the need for laws to prevent discrimination but insists that “disparities and differences in outcome are not necessarily racism”.

The present Tory leader uses bold language which may dismay social liberals in her party but she is also drawing dividing lines between the Tories and Reform and other forces on the Right.

Mr Farage had said the correct response to the murder of 18-year-old Henry Nowak was “pure cold rage”, and US Vice President JD Vance has argued this calls for “righteous anger”.

Mrs Badenoch said Conservatives were also angry but they “want to fix a broken system, not smash it to pieces”. Rage, she warned, is “not a strategy” and “not a solution”.

She used her speech to give an example of how she took on an equalities-obsessed bureaucracy during the last Government and defended the needs of “white, elderly, Christian people”.

“Some councils spend up to 70% of their funding on social care, a burden which was crushing many of them,” she said. “I wanted to allocate more money to councils who had greater social care responsibilities.

“But my officials told me that because of the public sector equality duty, we would be sued because the policy would disproportionately benefit white, elderly, Christian people. I told them that I was happy to be sued because any ounce of common sense would tell you that the majority of people in Britain needing social care are white, elderly, Christian people.”

She helms the Tories as the party fights for its electoral survival but her attack on identity politics is more than about political positioning.

Referring to her own children, she said: “They are half black and half white and I want them to feel that they can be both, but they don’t need to choose, that no one is going to be judging them because they look like their mother or their father, but judging them as individuals.”

We are getting a clearer idea than ever what Kemi-ism looks like. She believes she is in a battle for Britain, and she relishes the fight.