Though they have been in the public domain for the best part of half a decade, Kemi Badenoch’s claims about a premature offer from one of the world’s top medical schools have come under scrutiny. They’re a bit embarrassing, but are in and of themselves a bit of a storm in a teacup — even if they were shown to be flat-out lies, they’re far from career-ending (for some good, but also for some bad reasons). Instead, the most interesting thing about them is not just the straightforward intellectual insecurity they reveal, but also a fundamental misunderstanding of the role of the prime minister and shadow prime minister.
It’s long been part of popular Kemi lore — famous among supporters and infamous among detractors — that as a teenager, Olukemi Olufunto Adegoke, as she was then known, had set her sights on the University of Oxford and had then (by her own claims) been told by “‘some very lovely liberal headteachers” that she should instead set her sights on nursing instead. For her supporters, it’s toted as an early lesson in the soft bigotry of low expectations experienced by a Nigerian girl that had just arrived in England. For her detractors, the gleeful punchline is that achieving just BBD at A-Level is vindication of the well-meaning head teachers’ words of advice.
While the Oxford claims are often brought up, it’s taken until now for her much more unambiguous claims about medical school acceptance to be scrutinised outside of Twitter. There’s quite an endearing interview with Kemi in the Huffington Post from 2017 as part of a roundup of the 17 new MPs elected in that year’s general election. It’s worth a read because it’s an interesting portrait of her before a lot of the Kemi legend building happened (some by others, but some by Kemi). It is far more nuanced in its framing of the Oxford ambitions than subsequent retellings — compare it, for example, to this hagiography from Fraser Nelson in 2020 that lacks any of the subtlety and context and has inadvertently become one of the foundational texts for Kemi-bashing). However it is one of the earlier interviews where she makes the claim that: “I had actually got admission into medical school in the US — I got into Stanford pre-med”. Unlike the Oxford claims, which can be sympathetically viewed in the right context, this is a much more black and white claim.
It seems dubious given that Stanford School of Medicine does not offer such a programme to undergraduates. Nor, per sources according to The Guardian, does it offer places or scholarships based purely on SAT test results, as was claimed and then repeated in subsequent interviews by Badenoch.
It’s a bit of a pickle for the Conservative Party leader. She has batted away allegations of lying by saying that it was in her teenage years and exact details were fuzzy. However, she maintains that they were the result of exceptionally high SAT results that elicited offers from multiple medical schools. At this point, journalists should probably hold her feet to the fire on the SAT claims. While not a perfect correlation with IQ testing, SAT tests are very IQ test-like. They have two components, Verbal and Mathematical, each of which carries a score from 200-800. These scores are combined on a scale up to 1600. If Kemi Badenoch can produce those three numbers from a verifiable source, then everything changes. A score in the upper echelons — the kind that leads to a girl from Nigeria receiving scholarships from the best universities to study on the most prestigious of courses — would mean that the tittering over her flunked A-Levels would disappear.
I think this is perhaps wishful thinking, but this is intended to be a positive piece, and so I hold out hope. Which brings me to the next part.
At the time of the 1885 Criminal Law Amendment Act, when it was floated that lesbianism might be made illegal, it was apocryphally said that Queen Victoria had no idea why anybody would get up to such a thing, and therefore it couldn’t possibly really exist. There is a strong element of this in examining Kemi-ism. The Conservative Party leadership vote tells me that there are people out there supporting her, but it is very hard to understand quite what possible pleasures they’re getting out of it and how they could actually be real.
Indeed, I’ve written quite a few pieces for The Critic now where there has been a call to action for something the Kemi Must Do. Whether it’s embracing Thatcherite policies rather than just words, championing free speech, or supporting large-scale British healthcare reform. And it’s usually about this point in writing when I consider throwing in the towel and confessing to the ever patient commissioning editor that my dog had eaten my laptop. Not only is it, as in the case of Queen Victoria’s lesbians, hard to conceive that there might be people passionately participating in unconstrained Kemi-ism, but it’s also often hard to be motivated to see the point in willing Kemi on to something resembling success.
It’s a view shared by much of her own party, as those waiting in the wings will her on to just the right amount of clumsiness in the face of challenges presented to her, hoping for Keir Starmer or Nigel Farage to win each minor battle against her in a way that they themselves, whether James Cleverly or Robert Jenrick, or any other number of pretenders, imagine they would have wound up the victor. It’s why her Stanford claims are unlikely to leave a significant mark. Most people don’t give a toss, and it’s another calamity of just the right proportions to make her challengers look better without sinking her just yet.
There is, however, a straightforward case for wanting Kemi to be better, which is that there are likely four more years until a General Election. Keir Starmer and his allies remain just as determined to grind huge changes into the fabric of British society in that time. Starmerism may have got off to a stumbling start, but that has not diminished the desire to implement it, and no amount of crossing their fingers and wishing hard will make backroom Tory fantasies about The Bond Markets or the International Monetary Fund swooping in and providing a deus ex machina to propel the Conservatives back into power is going to make that a reality. A desire for a stronger Conservative leader is rational even from those that would like to see Reform in power. Socialism remains bad even when it makes your political opponent look bad. A Reform Party complacent in its position will not be pushed to better itself and form the policies most conducive to government.
As far as possible, I have tried to keep this a positive piece. Kicking the Conservatives for the sake of it has lost some of its excitement with repetition. However, the intention is not to let Kemi Badenoch off the hook for her economy with the truth. After all, she has a track record of such things, lest we forget her completely unforced disaster last year when in making accusations of dishonesty against the Reform Party, she revealed herself to be far from the brilliant engineer she had bigged herself up to be.
Nobody needs the PM to know how to code Python. They don’t need them to quote Aristophanes
Presenting herself as being a worthy candidate to lead one of the largest economies in the world and a nuclear power, and yet struggling to tell the whole truth is obviously and straightforwardly bad, and she should confront these failures head-on. But just as much of a hurdle to her ambitions is that these self aggrandising fibs speak to not merely intellectual insecurity, but also to somebody that hasn’t quite grasped what is needed from a leader. The prime minister is not, nor are they expected to be a philosopher king, possessing absolute knowledge. Her tall tales of dazzling medical schools as a teenager do nothing to give confidence that she could guide healthcare reform one way or another. If you require open-heart surgery, you want a GP that will have the humility to delegate that responsibility, not to tell you about their SATs while giving it a go with a scalpel as Mrs Miggins waits in reception to talk about her migraines.
The computer whizz stuff, the Stanford medical school claims, the not applying to Oxbridge because of racism, it’s all just silly nonsense. Nobody needs the PM to know how to code Python. They don’t need them to quote Aristophanes. They just need somebody able to grasp the problems besetting Britain — little fibs about easily surmounting every obstacle placed in her path simply by the sheer force of being Kemi do nothing for anyone. Honesty — that’s what Britain needs.
