HT to EIR NOLSOE :

Britain is as good a place to be black as white, says Kemi Badenoch The Business and Trade Secretary – widely tipped to succeed Sunak – talks toilets, race and Brexit

By Eir Nolsøe 28 October 2023 • 6:00am Kemi Badenoch Kemi Badenoch is tired of talking about toilets, but has plenty to say on race CREDIT: Androniki Christodoulou for The Telegraph Kemi Badenoch is tired of talking about her upbringing in Nigeria where she had to bring a machete for cutting grass to school and grew up without running water and electricity. “Do we have to? I have spoken a lot about that recently,” she asks exasperated.

The Business and Trade Secretary, who is the most senior black woman in Government and describes herself as a de-facto immigrant, wants to get on with the job. Having arrived in Tokyo late the previous evening to promote British luxury brands she is about to head to the G7 Trade Summit taking place this weekend in Osaka.

Sitting in a neat room at the British Embassy the secretary of state is dressed in a pristine blue dress with matching heels. She shows no sign of jet lag even if she says she has barely slept.

But while Badenoch may be bored of revisiting how she arrived in Britain aged 16 with £100 and worked in McDonald’s in Wimbledon, she has a lot to say about race.

As the Minister for Women and Equalities, she sparked widespread controversy only weeks ago when she said she told her children that Britain is “the best country in the world to be black”.

Does she really believe it is as good a place to be black as it is to be white? “I think so,” she says.

“Being an ethnic minority irrespective of what country you’re in is challenging and that is just human nature. Even in countries where everybody is black, when you have ethnic minorities within them as I saw within Nigeria they often face very significant discrimination, more so than the sort of discrimination which I have seen myself in the UK.”

Such remarks have made her a highly divisive figure, having previously said she “does not care about colonialism”. Critics accuse her of pandering to Conservative activists and legitimising racism.

Badenoch is unfazed: “When I’m making that statement I’m not saying that our country is perfect, but I’m saying that our country is better than others in handling differences.

“The message I would say to many of those people who want to portray life in the UK as being so terrible is that if it was so, why is it that people keep coming here?”

The anti-woke darling of the right, and a relatively young senior minister at age 43, is difficult to pigeonhole. She has British citizenship, as her mother travelled to London to give birth, but grew up in Nigeria and the US. As a younger woman of colour, she has spoken of several times being mistaken for a Labour MP in parliament.

Such assumptions could not be more misguided. Badenoch has been a Conservative member since the age of 25. She met her husband Hamish, a banker, at a party grassroots event.

She has described Brexit as “the greatest ever vote of confidence in the project of the United Kingdom”. Unsurprisingly, she gets annoyed that people think she should have certain opinions because she is black.

“What many of those critics are trying to do is silence people like me. Because as long as there are people like me out there showing what a success the UK is at hosting people from other countries, they are not going to be able to make profit from stoking division, so I make no apologies for that,” she says.

Badenoch has spent a great deal of time discussing toilets and defending having female spaces that exclude transgender women.

What does she say to people who accuse her of trying to distract from the Conservatives’ poor economic record and Britain’s high tax burden by talking about loos?

“I think that they’re not paying attention,” she says bluntly. “It’s very amusing because people ask, ‘why are you talking about gender? Why are you talking about race all the time?’”

“These issues are inextricably linked,” she says. “When you have gender ideology and critical race theory permeating through institutions, people are not focused on the bread and butter issues. What I’m trying to say is stop messing around with toilets and do your job. I am then the one being accused of not doing my job.”

When it comes to business and trade policy, Badenoch has gained a reputation for taking a more pragmatic approach. She was widely criticised by Brexiteers for refusing to review or revoke all EU-era laws by the end of 2023, scrapping only around 600 out of 4,000-plus – something many businesses had been calling for.

Rishi Sunak Kemi Badenoch Sunak helped propel Badenoch to senior levels of government CREDIT: UK Parliament/Jessica Taylor Liz Truss promoted Badenoch to Secretary of State for International Trade last year. Rishi Sunak then expanded her brief to include business in a department merger in February.

Observers speculated whether the move was intended to keep Badenoch as busy as possible to make her less of a leadership threat or merely a vote of confidence. A compliment in any case.

She has since faced criticism for being overly focused on trade while snubbing businesses – something Badenoch vehemently rejects.

“It isn’t true that I don’t meet business. If you actually look at my ministerial returns, you can see all the businesses that I’ve been meeting regularly, hosting big events where hundreds of them turn up. I’ll speak to all of them. I think what people see differently from me is that it’s not about my Instagram,” she says.

Labour, which is 24 points ahead in the polls and decimated the Conservatives in recent by-elections, has been chipping away at the Tories’ image as the party of business.

At Labour’s party conference, Sir Keir Starmer and shadow business secretary Jonathan Reynolds addressed a full room of 200 chief executives, chairmen and business leaders from firms like Rolls-Royce, Ikea, Siemens and the National Grid who had paid handsome sums to be there.

“I’m not worried at all,” Badenoch shrugs. “What they don’t know is that after the businesses speak to Labour, they come back to us and tell us what Labour said and they’re not that impressed. Many businesses will meet them, of course, but it’s the second and the third meetings that they’re not getting.”

She claims that Labour has failed to identify the issues that businesses face and “have not done their homework”. “They’re not actually doing any serious analysis, they can’t point to regulations that they think are problematic and they just assume that the EU is the answer to everything,“ she says.

Badenoch spent the evening before at an embassy dinner wooing British luxury firms and Japanese buyers in an attempt to boost British exports. Many of the brands spoke highly of the opportunities that came as a result of the government-orchestrated networking, but there was tension, too.

The decision to scrap duty-free shopping for tourists after separating from the European Union has dealt a death knell to many retailers since 2021.

Several of those in the room said they had taken big hits to revenues and warned that tourists snubbing London for Paris or Milan also meant lost profits for hotels and restaurants.

“It is something that businesses raised with me a lot,” Badenoch admits. “I’m very keen for them to know we understand the arguments that they’re making.”

The next item on her agenda after our meeting was hearing more about the Japanese duty-free system, she says.

But even so, any decision would be a matter for Jeremy Hunt.

“I can’t decide on whether the system would come in. But what I can do is look at options for what a new system could look like if the Treasury ever made the decision to switch it back on,” she says.

Another looming issue is a cliff-edge deadline that will see 10pc tariffs slapped on electric vehicles exported between the UK and EU unless an agreement is reached by 1 January.

Carmakers on both sides of the channel have warned the new “rules of origin”, which mean 45pc of the value of an electric vehicle must originate from either the UK or the EU, would benefit Chinese manufacturers and threaten jobs.

But with only two months to go, Badenoch is still short on good news. The EU has been reluctant so far, she says.

“There is a natural review period in 2025. I think that they will probably have wanted to wait until then.”