Mick Hartley

Janice Turner in the Times today, in praise of Kemi Badenoch:

How, some asked in wonder, did this Lagos-raised young woman with braided hair win over the Tory membership: the whitest, oldest, and by definition, most conservative of electorates? The answer was clear in her interview last Sunday with Laura Kuenssberg: she didn’t run on her identity. Indeed she dismissed the idea that being the first female black leader of a major UK political party mattered very much.

“I think the best thing will be when we get to a point when the colour of your skin is no more remarkable than the colour of your eyes or your hair,” she said. “We live in a multiracial country. We have to work very hard to make sure this works, and … people don’t see themselves as groups rather than all being British.” (Then, in combative Kemi style, she goaded Rachel Reeves for boasting about breaking “the very, very low glass ceiling” of first female chancellor.)

Hers was once the anti-racist position. Martin Luther King, whose words Badenoch seemed to echo, dreamt of a nation where people “will not be judged by the colour of their skin but by the content of their character”. Badenoch asks to be judged by her politics not her “identity”, yet to some her politics betray her identity. The Labour MP Dawn Butler retweeted a post by the academic Kehinde Andrews saying Badenoch is “the black face of white supremacy”. They see people of colour as a homogeneous voting bloc: anyone who thinks differently is a traitor.

Even if you abhor Badenoch’s views, her stance is refreshingly egoless. Compare her with Labour’s most senior black politician, the foreign secretary David Lammy, who couldn’t even put aside his identity when addressing the UN about war in Ukraine. “I stand here,” he said, “also as a black man whose ancestors were taken in chains from Africa, at the barrel of a gun to be enslaved.” With no relevance to Putin’s atrocities or Britain’s interests, this was purest self-aggrandisement.

It's an interesting contrast. Whatever you may think of their politics, the Tories have featured on their front bench a number of intelligent outspoken women from immigrant backgrounds – Pritti Patel, Suella Braverman – while on the Labour side we have the lamentable Dawn Butler and the hopelessly over-promoted David Lammy, who do little but play the race card at every opportunity.