Kemi Badenoch and Robert Jenrick go head-to-head in race for Tory leadership: Ex-McDonalds burger flipper raised in Nigeria takes on the son of a Midlands metalworker as party lurches right after election disaster

The next leader of the Conservative Party will either be a former McDonalds burger flipper or the son of a Midlands metalworker after today’s shock election result. 

Kemi Badenoch will take on Robert Jenrick in a vote by party members, with the winner announced on November 2.

Before then we can expect a flurry of activity as they both vie to prove their worth – and their ideological purity – to the grassroots who will make the decision. 

Both are from the right of the party, meaning that after the elimination of James Cleverly members will not also be deciding on the direction of the party.

And though they have very different back stories, the next Conservative party leader will have the most modest background since Sir John Major in 1990. 

Upbringing

Ms Badenoch was born in Wimbledon, south west London, but moved with her family to Lagos in Nigeria as a very young baby. She was raised in west Africa before returning to Britain again at the age of 16 to fend for herself.

In her maiden speech as an MP in 2017, she told the House of Commons there was ‘lot that Africa can teach us’.

But she also detailed the experience she had of ‘real poverty’ while growing up in Nigeria. 

‘Growing up in Nigeria I saw real poverty—I experienced it, including living without electricity and doing my homework by candlelight, because the state electricity board could not provide power,’ she said in 2017.

‘And fetching water in heavy, rusty buckets from a borehole a mile away, because the nationalised water company could not get water out of the taps.

‘Unlike many colleagues born since 1980, I was unlucky enough to live under socialist policies. It is not something I would wish on anyone, and it is just one of the reasons why I am a Conservative.’

She worked in McDonald’s while putting herself through college in south London, living with family friends.

She later studied engineering at Sussex University and has spoken of once being once the only woman on a building site with 300 men.

Ms Badenoch’s pre-politics career also included a law degree from the University of London, as well as stints at Coutts bank and the Spectator magazine as head of digital. 

At the Conservative Party Conference last week it was revealed she quit the latter role while pregnant, rather than take maternity leave and pay.

She is married to Hamish Badenoch, an investment banker, and the couple have two daughters and a son.

Ms Badenoch has revealed she is a keen chess and poker player, an avid reader of Terry Pratchett novels and has a love for sci-fi.

Mr Jenrick, who grew up in Shropshire, is a trained solicitor who worked in corporate law at leading international law firms in London and Moscow.  

At the age of 19, in an interview with Cambridge student magazine Varsity in 2001, the history undergraduate was asked what he would like to be in ten years’ time.

Jenrick replied: ‘A millionaire businessman fighting my first election to Parliament.’ 

The father-of-three then turned his attentions to business, working in senior commercial management at the world-famous global art firm Christie’s. 

But during his election campaign he made much of his humble roots. In his speech to the conference last month he said: ’50 years ago, in 1974, my Dad, Bill, and my Mum, Jenny, came here to Birmingham. 

‘Dad had a job at the last great iron foundry in the Black Country, in Coseley. A vast, Victorian metalworks that made the pots and pans of the Empire.’

He later posed with his parents and his wife, Michal Berkner, who is nine years his senior. The pair met at Skadden Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom – a New York law firm which has done work for Russian and Ukrainian oligarchs, including Chelsea FC owner Roman Abramovich.

Tory years

Ms Badenoch first ran to be an MP at the 2010 general election but came third behind Labour and the Liberal Democrats in the Dulwich and West Norwood constituency. 

A place on the London Assembly later became available for Ms Badenoch in 2015, which she retained at a City Hall election a year later. 

She then won her seat in the House of Commons when she secured the Saffron Walden constituency at the 2017 general election. It was renamed North West Essex at the last election.

Ms Badenoch is a committed Brexiteer and has been unafraid to take on ‘culture war’ issues.

‘I always lean right instinctively,’ she has previously told the ConservativeHome website.

As well as being business secretary under Rishi Sunak she also held the Women and Equalities brief in Cabinet.

This saw her clash repeatedly with the pro-trans lobby, especially last year when she tasked Britain’s equalities watchdog with looking at whether legislation should be updated to make clear that ‘sex’ refers to ‘biological sex’.

She remained in the Cabinet until the election in July but was unafraid to counter policies she disagreed with, such as plans for a smoking ban, prompting suggestions she was positioning herself for a leadership bid from inside the Cabinet.

Mr Jenrick has served in Government under four prime ministers in four different roles since first becoming a minister in 2018.

Having won Newark in a 2014 by-election (which included Nigel Farage) Theresa May promoted him to a Treasury minister in January 2018.

Ms May’s demise saw him climb higher, with Boris Johnson promoting him to secretary of state for housing, communities and local government when the former premier took office in July 2019.

But his time around the cabinet table ended in controversy, when he was sacked after a string of high-profile and damaging accusations.

The arrival of Liz Truss in Number 10 saw him return to Government for a short stint in the Department of Health.

Then in October 2022, with Rishi Sunak taking the top job, Mr Jenrick was appointed immigration minister.

The role was never going to be an easy task, with many in the Tory party and beyond calling for the Government to reduce the number of people crossing the English Channel in small boats and while also reducing legal migration.

A commitment to ‘stop the boats’ was one of Mr Sunak’s five pledges at the start of year, putting Mr Jenrick’s brief right at the top of the Government’s priorities.

But despite Mr Sunak’s stated commitment to do ‘everything it takes’ to make the Rwanda scheme operational, Mr Jenrick shocked Westminster by resigning and becoming one of the PM’s most strident backbench Tory critics.

Policies

Ms Badenoch ran for the leadership on a campaign called ‘Renewal 2030’. She argies that under Rishi Sunak and other recent leaders the Tories ‘talked right, but governed left’.

He platform for winning at the next election at the end of the decade involves a return to Tory values, including promoting the family and personal responsibility, tighter immigration and opposing ‘woke’ ideology.

When previously running for leader she taped over the signs for gender neutral toilets at a speech venue and replaced them with separate male and female ones. 

But critics claimed her campaign was also light on many specifics of what this actually meant in practice,.

Despite a history of getting into heated rows very easily, she also portrays herself as straight talking. 

She launched herself wholeheartedly into a dispute with former Dr Who actor David Tennant over trans rights in the summer. 

In her conference speech she insisted the Tories must not be ‘afraid to do the right thing’ as she warned against treating government as a ‘media’ strategy.

The shadow housing secretary delivered a bullish message to activists about the need to be radical as she tries to get her leadership back on track. 

She warned that the Conservatives must ‘reverse decline’ and recognise that the government is ‘broken’ as she wrapped up the speeches by the four contenders.

Vowing to ‘reboot and reprogram’ the country, Ms Badenoch said championing capitalism and combating the rise of ‘identity politics’ would be critical.

In a crowd-pleasing attack on welfare culture, she argued: ‘The wealth for the country comes from the people who work in it, not live off it.’ 

Giving a blunt assessment of the Tories’ 14 years in power, she insisted: ‘We promised to lower taxes. They went up. We promised to lower immigration. It went up… and we did not always defend our values.’ 

Mr Jenrick ran a campaign in which immigration was front and centre. Get that sorted and the rest – the economy, the NHS, will follow. 

He was more outspoken than any other candidate on this, advocating for leaving the jurisdiction of the European Court of Human Rights, which the Tory right blames for blocking attempts to stop small boat crossings.  

At conference Mr Jenrick urged Tories to reignite the spirit of Thatcher, scrap European human rights laws and secure borders today as he laid out his case to activists. 

The former immigration minister said the party must be ‘honest’ about its legacy, including the failure to bring down inflows and ‘Stop the Boats’.

‘The country just doesn’t trust us,’ he said. ‘We failed to deliver the strong NHS, the strong economy and yes the strong border that we promised. Friends we must never fail our people again.’ 

Despite potshots from rivals for ‘walking away’ from government in protest at the Rwanda plan being too weak, Mr Jenrick insisted that was the only thing that meant he hung on to his seat at the election.

In a rousing appeal, he said he was from the tradition of ‘Magna Carta’ and spoke of how the Tories changed leadership and direction in 1974, with Margaret Thatcher taking the helm.

He committed to leaving the European Convention on Human Rights to deal with Channel boat arrivals. He said the UK would no longer be open to everyone ‘and their relatives’. 

Mr Jenrick pledged to crack down on the ‘bloated’ foreign aid budget and pump defence spending up to 3 per cent of GDP.   

He also launched a culture wars attack at Keir Starmer saying he would ‘take the knee but he will never take a stand’, and could not see why Britain is great.

Gaffes 

Both leadership candidates have a checkered back cataloge that could come back to haunt them.

Ms Badenoch  earned the nickname ‘Kemi-kase’ from her critics for her ability to put her foot in it and trigger a row out of nothing. 

At conference she was forced to deny suggesting maternity pay for new mums is ‘excessive’.

The shadow housing secretary came under furious attack from Labour after she was asked about the benefit during an interview.

Ms Badenoch was arguing that businesses face too much red tape and the tax burden is too high when she was pressed on maternity pay.   

‘Maternity pay varies depending on who you work for, but it is a function, where it’s statutory maternity pay. It is a function of tax,’ she said.

And in 2018 she apologised for hacking into Harriet Harman’s website.

She said she carried out the ‘foolish prank’ before she was elected to Parliament, in a lighthearted interview for the online Core Politics channel.

Ms Harman said she had received a written apology from the Tory MP and accepted it.

The prank is said to have constituted a breach of the Computer Misuse Act (CMA), potentially a criminal offence.

It prompted a call for the MP to be investigated, although others said the way it had been dealt with between the politicians showed such incidents did not have to result in criminal action.

Asked what the ‘naughtiest’ thing she had ever done was, the MP for Saffron Walden, in Essex, replied: ‘About 10 years ago I hacked into… a Labour MP’s website and I changed all the stuff in there to say nice things about Tories.’

She told the Mail on Sunday it was ‘a foolish prank over a decade ago, for which I apologise’.

Mr Jenrick’s his time around the cabinet table as housing secretary ended in controversy in 2021, when he was sacked after a string of high-profile and damaging accusations.

His departure followed the unlawful approval of a Tory donor’s housing development and eyebrow-raising journeys during lockdown.

Then PM Boris Johnson stuck by Mr Jenrick despite anger over his approval of media mogul Richard Desmond’s 1,500-home Westferry Printworks development in east London after they sat next to each other at a Tory function.

The permission came the day before a new council community levy would have cost Mr Desmond’s company an extra £40 million.

Mr Jenrick later had to quash his own approval, conceding the decision was ‘unlawful’ due to ‘apparent bias’.

There was also criticism over Mr Jenrick’s decision to travel 150 miles from his London property to his Herefordshire home – also 130 miles from his constituency –  and then journeying for more than an hour to visit his parents in Shropshire while the country was in Covid lockdown.

After it emerged he traveled from the capital to the country pad near Leominster – despite having a £2.5million flat near Parliament – he said it was his family’s main home. 

But his website at the time said he, Michal and their three daughters ‘live in Southwell near Newark, and in London’.

Parliamentary expenses records at the time show that he had claimed £100,000 in rent, council tax and travel expenses for Newark since being elected .

The role also saw him take on another thorny issue where a misstep can draw the ire of the Tory backbenches – planning reform.

With controversies mounting, and his popularity fraying with Tory MPs who objected to what they feared would be too much housebuilding in the wrong place, a reshuffle saw Mr Jenrick shown the door.

Last year, while immigration minister, he defended ordering the removal of Mickey Mouse artwork at an asylum centre for unaccompanied children.

Murals depicting cartoon characters were painted over at a Kent facility used to hold those who arrive in Britain after crossing the Channel in small boats.

Mr Jenrick was reported to have felt the murals gave the impression the UK was too ‘welcoming’ to migrants arriving from France after undertaking sea journeys.

Refugee charities lashed out at the action by ‘heartless’ ministers, while Labour branded it ‘utterly absurd’.

But Mr Jenrick suggested the murals were not ‘age appropriate’ as he told the House of Commons the majority of people who pass through the centre were teenagers.

Last week at conference supporters were sporting caps saying ‘we want Bobby J’, including some who have posed with him.

 He was also introduced at one event with the faithful as ‘Bobby J, the legal eagle candidate’, a reference to his previous career as a solicitor.

However Mail Online revealed that ‘Bobby J’ is actually a slang term for a popular sex act, as recorded by the online smut compendium the Urban Dictionary.

One rival campaign source joked: ‘We knew the Jenrick campaign sucked, but with this latest gaffe he’s really going down.’