Kemi Badenoch isn't working | Cover Story with Tom McTague
The New Statesman | UK politics and culture
The New Statesman
4.4 • 1.4K Ratings
🗓️ 23 July 2025
⏱️ 43 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
She was the Tory saviour. Now, by November, she could be gone.
Where did it all go wrong for Kemi Badenoch?
--
For this week's New Statesman magazine, Will Lloyd has written a powerful and revealing profile of the Nigerian immigrant who rose to lead the Conservative Party.
Will joins Tom McTague to discuss what he discovered in the course of his reporting, including why Conservative grandees first celebrated, then turned against, Kemi Badenoch.
They explore whether racism plays a role in the way Badenoch has been treated, and whether the woman who some cast as a new Thatcher was ever as able as the Conservatives wanted to believe.
--
Read Will Lloyd's profile of Kemi Badenoch in the New Statesman magazine, or online: Kemi Badenoch isn't working
Listen next: How to defeat reform - exclusive polling with analyst Steve Akehurst
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Transcript
Click on a timestamp to play from that location
| 0:00.0 | Get 3% cash pack when you transfer your pension to free trade. |
| 0:04.6 | Switch to one of the UK's cheapest SIP providers by the 31st of August. |
| 0:08.9 | With a free trade pension, there's just one flat fee, zero commission, and access to over 6,200 shares, guilts, mutual funds and more. |
| 0:17.4 | Visit freetrade.io slash pod to start your transfer. Capital at risk, other charges may |
| 0:22.8 | apply. Sip eligibility rules and decencies apply. 10,000 pounds to qualify. Cashback capped at |
| 0:28.0 | £1,500. The New Statesman. A few months ago, she was the Conservative Party's saviour. |
| 0:40.5 | By November, she could be gone. |
| 0:42.4 | What on earth happened to Kemi Baitnock? |
| 0:45.0 | I'm Tom McKeague, and this is The New Statesman Podcast. |
| 0:50.7 | Kemi Badnott rose to the Tory leadership from the ruins of Rishi-Soonak's disastrous general election last year. |
| 0:57.4 | Senior Conservative leaders saw her as the future of modern conservatism, but now as Will Lloyd found in his brilliant profile published in the New Statesman this week, they have all turned against her. |
| 1:08.7 | Will joins me now in the studio. Welcome, Will. |
| 1:10.6 | Hello, Tom. So, |
| 1:13.5 | the mood has shifted. Tell me why. The mood has shifted because the whole situation right |
| 1:21.9 | now with the conservative leadership is a bit like, say we bought a sofa from, where would you buy a sofa from? |
| 1:29.3 | DFS. |
| 1:30.3 | We buy the sofa. |
| 1:31.3 | We've looked at it in a brochure, you know, we looked it on the internet. |
| 1:34.3 | It's got great reviews, four or five stars, you get it into the house, doesn't have any legs. |
| 1:39.3 | There's no legs on the sofa. |
| 1:41.3 | So you start to think, should we take the sofa back to the shop? |
| 1:45.7 | Let's just go back five years. |
... |
Transcript will be available on the free plan in 18 days. Upgrade to see the full transcript now.
Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from The New Statesman, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.
Generated transcripts are the property of The New Statesman and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.
Copyright © Tapesearch 2025.