A (wo)man of the people?
When Kemi Badenoch appears on the Conservative Party stage of aspiring prime ministers, she seems to present herself as a woman of the people.
A truth-teller.
Someone who will let people know the pros and cons of every decision she would make as Britain’s leader.
There are flashes of a man named Chief Manga, cabinet minister in an unnamed country in Africa in the last century. For all that the Chief is only a fictional character in Chinua Achebe’s 1966 novel ‘A Man of the People’, he is meant to be that familiar being: “a born politician; he could get away with almost anything he said or did.”
Ms Badenoch seems like a born politician, with gumption and daring in spades. Consider the culture wars that she is waging from the right of the Conservative Party: She has challenged the notion of widespread institutional racism in the UK, inserted herself into the debate on gender-neutral toilets (against) and spoken about “jobs which lit…
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