Kemi Badenoch, sandwiches and attracting British voters

Good morning. As the year draws to a close, we are at a point where most people in Westminster feel too tired and lazy to write about serious matters. That’s a big reason why the main talking points this week are Nigel Farage’s hopes for an election in five years and Kemi Badenoch’s feelings about sandwiches. Some thoughts in today’s note on the latter and why it’s not quite as trivial as it sounds.

Ms. Saffron Walden’s feelings about bread

Kemi Badenoch has made an insightful point interview with Spectatorbut the main point of it is her aversion to sandwiches.

“I’m not a sandwich person, I don’t think sandwiches are a real food. That’s what you have for breakfast. I won’t touch the bread if it’s wet.”

Keir Starmer’s spokesman responded by talking about the prime minister’s love for “the great British sandwich”, while Nigel Farage recorded a short video talked about his love of lunch and sandwiches, both of which Badenoch criticized in her interview. At the time of writing, Ed Davey has yet to comment, which seems like a pretty convincing argument for voting Liberal Democrats if you ask me.

There is a serious point here. For example, if I asked my grandmother – a white South African who came to the UK at 21, heavily pregnant, because she knew that her (my mother’s) mixed-race child would not be able to enjoy the opportunities and the freedom she enjoys. wanted her in apartheid-era South Africa – about English bread, she would also use words like “moist” and would probably say that it wasn’t real food either.

And I, as a British-born mixed-race liberal, would probably say “that’s strange, ma’am” and think nothing more of it. Like my grandmother, Kemi Badenoch grew up in another country: she was born in England but spent the first 16 years of her life in Nigeria, and like my grandmother, she came to this country for political reasons. As Tomiwa Owolade wrote a few weeks ago, in an excellent column for the Timesit is impossible to understand the politics of Badenoch without understanding the upheaval and chaos in Nigeria during the 1990s.

This isn’t the first time Badenoch has said something that to most Britons might sound a bit odd. During the leadership election, she said she “became working class” when she worked at McDonald’s at the age of 16, coming to the UK due to upheaval in Nigeria – which has been suspended from the Commonwealth general for violating the Harare Declaration a year earlier.

This is something I also realized from my grandmother’s story: having an art degree from the University of Cape Town, the only job she could get in England was as a cleaner. (Whether it’s because she’s from Cape Town or because of the lure of an arts degree, I leave it to you to decide.)

Now, I think that for most British people, who have not had a direct relationship with someone like Badenoch in living memory, the things she said in interviews seemed quite strange. For most British people, the idea that you can “become working class” seems quite foreign to most of us. The fact that the sandwiches you buy at our supermarket are strangely moist, again, seems quite strange.

What Badenoch really needs to do is find a way to speak to the fact that she is a first-generation immigrant. In my view, there are all sorts of ways that she would be a valuable addition to our politics. I’m the first in my family not to have to move country because of politics – that’s the stability that we in the UK often take for granted, and Badenoch doesn’t. I don’t always agree with her politics but she is right about the importance of Britain’s stability and warns that we take it for granted at our peril . And part of what makes this country great in my view is that a first-generation immigrant can rise to become the leader of the main party of the British right, as Badenoch himself noted.

But unless she can make that a central part of her leadership, she will be defined by interventions that to most people will seem quite odd and out of character. how they view politics. There is a similarity with Keir Starmer here: if he allows his enemies to define his tenure as director of public prosecutions, his record could be characterized by a list of long those he failed to convict or the charges he should have brought. If Badenoch can’t turn her own backstory into a positive part of voting for her, it will define her leadership and not in the way she wants it to.

Now try this

Last night I had a blast with my FT columnist friends. I must express two special words of gratitude: to Martin Sandbu for arranging the shared taxi return from darkest West London (as Sign up for Free Lunch emails for Premium subscribers if you haven’t already) and thanks to Jemima Kelly and Anjli Raval for their wonderful additions to our playlist. The real highlight for me was the creation of “Mundian to Bach Ke”, you can listen here. I added that song along with a few others from last night to the Inside Politics playlist, you can listen here.

However you spend it, have a great weekend!

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