The Tory leadership battle is now underway with the traditional first act: to identify a frontrunner and start blowing poison darts. Kemi Badenoch is the frontrunner and famously combative. She’s in her early 40s. So it must stand to reason that she’d have let off steam in a chatroom somewhere, surely?
This is where it gets interesting. In Westminster, a link is being shared over WhatsApp between candidate teams, MPs and general Westminster watchers of ‘Naijablog’ a blog about Nigeria, where a below-the-line commentator by the name of ‘Kemi’ had plenty to say – and plenty bones to pick. The comments are direct, sometimes rude, often confrontational, making off-colour jokes and taking no prisoners. In other words, sounding very much like a certain Kemi Badenoch who was then studying for a postgrad at Birkbeck. Here is a selection of the fruitier comments from the user called ‘Kemi’:
- On Diane Abbott (original blog here). ‘Abbot is a racist hypocrite. She spent years lambasting people for sending their kids to private school, and then turned round and did exactly the same thing. She had to admit on TV that her decision was indefensible. She also made a claim that “blonde, blue-eyed Finnish girls” in her local hospital in east London were unsuitable as nurses because they had “never met a black person before”. Can you imagine if someone had said the reverse, that black skinned, people were unsuitable as nurses if they had never met a white person before?’
- On Britain’s colonial legacy in Nigeria (blog here). [Comments she disputed in italics].
- “Nigeria for centuries was a country entirely based on culture and tradition,” ‘UTTER BULLSHIT. Nigeria has only existed as a country for 93 years. Not for centuries. It was made up of many kingdoms with many different cultures and traditions imbibed from all over africa and the middle east. Our culture and traditions like that of many other countries, changed regularly and even before the Brits came, our history records complaints by the ever vocal elders about how we were losing our culture.’
- “One which held greater respect for people over things.” ‘COMPLETE AND UTTER BULLSHIT. We bought and sold our people, friends, families and our enemies as chattels. Our rulers sold them to Europeans for guns and broken mirrors. HOW IS THAT A CULTURE THAT VALUES PEOPLE OVER THINGS? Go and read A History of the Yoruba Peoples. Or, if that is too big for you, go read Chinua Achebe’s “Things fall Apart” anything even.’
- “one which put age before power!” ‘Not really, although it definitely put age over common sense and STILL DOES. This is why we are continuously ruled and bullied by a succession of old fools. It was colonized. Like many countries, such as India, South Africa and Ghana which are all doing MUCH better than Nigeria.’
- “stripped of its culture” ‘Such as human sacrifices, the creation of outcast tribes like the osu and the killing of twins’
- “and now has started building up its new way” ‘Which explains why the country is much worse than it was 30 years ago and has just had the most fraudulent elections ever held. Otherwise, I doubt anybody can list 10 things or even 5 good things that the British stripped us of. i.e. things which by 1960 we had been stripped of. The truth is that we LOST and THREW away our culture. Stop blaming others for the state of our country. Give this colonisation argument a rest!’
- Defending Thai women who marry Westerners for security, not love (link here) ‘Those Thai women do not love the husbands but the security of the relationships, and while there’s nothing wrong with that, people should not flatter themselves to think that there is any genuine feeling or affection involved. Look at the wife of Ken Bigley for instance. As soon as her husband had been captured in Iraq, she packed her bags (and no doubt all the family treasures) and moved back to Thailand ages before he lost his head! No desperate pleas in front of the camera like all the normal English wives who truly cared whether their husbands lived or died. Transactional relationships have their place. As everyone: caveat emptors, innit?’
- On Nigerian women who put up with philandering husbands (blog here) She responded to a blog about a road rage incident in Nigeria where one driver says he was told “how dare you do that – I am a married woman!” The blog author asks of his commentators: ‘Do Nigerian men really only learn respect for women when they are married? If not, why do some Nigerian women think this?’
‘Kemi’ replies: ‘That is why Nigerian men tend to be more philandering than most. Because they know the stupid bush goat they have at home is too scared to become single or divorced and lose the “respect” she associates with her status. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: many Nigerian women believe Mrs. is better than Dr. as a title.’
- Why it’s not insulting to call out an idiot (link here). ‘A person who cannot think or reason is an idiot. It is only an insult when used to someone who is clearly not an idiot. To call an honest man a thief is an insult. To call an armed robber a thief is NOT an insult.’
- On politeness (link here). ‘Most of the people who changed the world, for good were notoriously rude. It was the bad people, Idi Amin, Hitler etc who were charming and respectful. People like you would have been defending them that they were good people because they had good manners. Robert Mugabe was also once known for his good manners!! Meanwhile, the scientists and philosophers who gave us the advanced world we take for granted were famously anti-social to the point of misanthropy. People even think Einstein and Newton might have had Asperger Syndrome. Had Einstein been a Nigerian no doubt he would have died a clerk in the patent office because some buffoon of a superior would have decided that he was rude and had no respect.’
So is this Kemi Badenoch? The author of Naijablog, “Jeremy”, describes the then Tory candidate Kemi Adegoke as “my former sparring partner” which suggests she was known to him as a commentator in the early days when very few left comments. Also this was 2006-2009, when people were far less guarded about their digital footprint and would not have really thought about the phenomenon of digital archivists trawling back over their juvenilia.
And were it Badenoch, is it damning? Or even damaging to a leadership bid? That’s trickier. How much of the above comments would the average voter, let alone the average Conservative member, really disagree with? That’s the slight problem about this as an attack dossier: it is possible to rotten-cherry-pick words to claim (for example) that she hates Nigerian women or somehow praised Hitler. But a click on the link to see the context and all of that fades away.
‘Revealed: Kemi actually means the stuff she says’ is hardly the most incriminating headline. ‘This is dirty tricks from rivals,’ says a Badenoch ally of the dossier. Mr S has anyway asked her office for comment. We’ll publish a reply if one arrives…
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