Kemi Badenoch should stop being woke

The Tory leadership candidate Kemi Badenoch has long argued against the Labour party and the left’s ‘divisive agenda of identity politics’. Instead, she has sought to portray the Conservatives as a truly ‘colour-blind party’ and a ‘genuine meritocracy’. Speaking to the Times earlier this year, she even argued that we should not make a ‘big deal’ of her potentially becoming the first black woman to lead the party.

So it’s strange, as ballots for the leadership contest go out to Tory members, to see Badenoch suddenly emphasising her ethnicity. The Essex MP would be ‘Labour’s worst nightmare’, she told the Telegraph this week, in part because her race would protect the Tories from accusations of racism. ‘[Labour] want to paint people on the right as being prejudiced’, she said, but ‘with me there, they will be unable to make that case convincingly’. Badenoch said she has already ‘stood firm’ in the face of such attacks in the past, and ‘exposed a lot of their hypocrisy’.