Kemi Badenoch has made the list of final 8 for the Conservative party battle to succeed Boris Johnson as Prime Minister.
Badenoch who is a former UK Equalities minister was born on 2 January 1980 in London to Nigerian parents and also spent her childhood in the United States and Nigeria
She joined the Conservative Party at the age of 25 when she contested in the 2010 general elections for the Dulwich and West Norwood constituency against Labour’s Tessa Jowell and came in third place and was elected as MP for Saffron Walden in 2017.
Badenoch will be competing for the role of Prime Minister against former UK Chancellor Rishi Sunak, Penny Mordaunt, Tom Tugendhat, Liz Truss, Nadhim Zahawi, Jeremy Hunt, and Suella Braverman according to Financial Times.
In her campaign launched at the headquarters of the Policy Exchange think-tank in Westminster, Badenoch said that:
“Now I recognize that this is an ambitious agenda. And running to be Prime Minister when you’re a 42-year-old is by definition ambitious, but I am ambitious: for our country and our party. I chose to become a Conservative MP to serve, and I chose this country because I can be who I am and I could be everything that I wanted to be.
Also stating, she supports low taxes in the long term, but according to reports, she did not set out any plans for specific tax cuts, unlike some of her rivals.
“free markets, limited government, and a strong nation-state.
There have been lots of promises to cut taxes and I understand why. I’m committed to lowering corporate and personal taxes. But I won’t enter a bidding war to make promises we can’t keep is a betrayal of everything we stand for.”
Her supporters include former cabinet minister, Michael Gove as well as several other senior Conservative members, Neil O’Brien and Lee Rowley.
Badenoch studied Computer Systems Engineering at the University of Sussex, completing an MEng in 2003, and completed an LLB at Birkbeck, the University of London in 2009.
