Kemi Badenoch says she no longer sees herself as Nigerian despite upbringing
Kemi Badenoch has said she no longer considers herself Nigerian and does not possess a Nigerian passport.The Conservative party leader, who was born in London, but grew up in Nigeria and the US and did not return to the UK until she was 16, said she had not renewed her Nigerian passport in two decades.Speaking to the Rosebud podcast, Badenoch said: “I’m Nigerian through ancestry, by birth, despite not being born there because of my parents, but by identity I’m not really.I know the country very well, I have a lot of family there, and I’m very interested in what happens there.“But home is where my now family is, and my now family is my children, it’s my husband and my brother and his children, in-laws.
The Conservative party is very much part of my family, my extended family, I call it.”In 1980 Badenoch was among the last people to automatically receive British citizenship because she was born in the UK.Margaret Thatcher abolished birthright citizenship the following year.“Finding out that I did have that British citizenship was a marvel to so many of my contemporaries, so many of my peers,” she said.“I think the reason that I came back here was actually a very sad one, and it was that my parents thought: ‘There is no future for you in this country.
’” She recalled “never quite feeling that I belonged there”.The future Tory leader moved back to the UK aged 16 to live with a friend of her mother because of the worsening political and economic situation in Nigeria, and to study for her A-levels.When Badenoch’s father, Femi Adegoke, who was a doctor, died in Nigeria in 2022 she obtained a visa to travel there, which she described as a “big fandango”.Sign up to Headlines UKGet the day’s headlines and highlights emailed direct to you every morningafter newsletter promotionShe has on occasion clashed with the Nigerian government.Last year the country’s vice-president, Kashim Shettima, suggested she could “remove the Kemi from her name” if she was not proud of her “nation of origin”.
It is unclear what promoted Shettima’s remarks but Badenoch has frequently spoken about corruption in Nigeria and growing up with a sense of fear and insecurity.The Tory leader told the podcast she had not experienced racial prejudice in Britain “in any meaningful form”.“I knew I was going to a place where I would look different to everybody, and I didn’t think that that was odd,” she said.“What I found actually quite interesting was that people didn’t treat me differently, and it’s why I’m so quick to defend the UK whenever there are accusations of racism.”
Josh Tongue insists England ‘pretty chilled’ at prospect of big run chase
Having won the first Test by successfully surpassing a target of 371 in Leeds, England will attempt to win the last and with it the series by chasing 374 at the Oval . If the statisticians and bookmakers don’t fancy their chances the team themselves are not just confident but “chilled” about the task they face on day four.“It is a replay from Headingley,” said Josh Tongue. “It will be a great day of cricket and a great day for us if we get the runs. How we play as a batting unit is very positive and very exciting
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Fielding is an attitude, Shane Warne would often say. To the extent it could be tempting at times to conclude Shane Warne didn’t have 37 different nuggets of well-thumbed cricketing wisdom, he just said the same nugget of well-thumbed cricketing wisdom 37 times. But Warne was, of course, right, as he was about all cricket things, as you might expect from any self-respecting genius-level leg-spin, poker-playing, bikini-magnate-squiring wunderkind.What attitude was expressed by England’s fielding on day three of this fine-margins final Test, as India batted their way to a lead of 373? What kind of vibe, aura, energy is being projected by a unit that dropped a total of six catches in India’s second innings at the Oval, the most by any England team in almost 20 years?Judging by the current range of go-tos, the obvious choices range between super-cool, jocular moralising and inexplicably pissy. Maybe England were just jaded by repetition
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England suffer late Zak Crawley blow in chase of 374 to win fifth Test and India series
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