Whoever becomes Prime Minister, Kemi Badenoch is the real winner of the Tory leadership contest
AND then there were three.
Kemi Badenoch was yesterday the fourth wannabe Tory PM jettisoned from this increasingly bitter beauty parade for the keys to No 10.
The former Equalities minister polled the fewest votes, leaving Rishi Sunak, Penny Mordaunt and Liz Truss to face the final ballot of MPs.
By the end of today, we will know which two candidates will be put forward to the membership at large.
And no matter who goes on to fill Boris’s well-scuffed shoes, it is Kemi who has undoubtedly proven herself to be the true winner in this race.
For many, this whip-smart 42-year-old seemed to come out of nowhere.
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If two weeks ago you’d have picked a member of the public at random and asked them who Kemi was, you would have been met with blank stares.
But in the short time between Johnson’s resignation and now, she has become the face of what a future Tory leadership could — and should — look like.
She has opened people’s eyes to what is possible if we break away from the stale status quo.
Kemi is exactly the kind of person the party needs if they are to have any sort of future at all — and crucially, if they don’t want to spend the next decade sitting on the Opposition benches.
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Why? First, because she is popular.
In a YouGov poll published yesterday, Tory members said they would vote for Kemi in a face-off with the other three candidates in the race.
It’s a real shame her elimination from the contest means members will not get this chance.
The public has obviously warmed to her no-nonsense, unashamedly pro-British, true-blue credentials.
And these qualities are not just a front.
She was the minister behind the Government’s Commission on Race And Ethnic Disparity, which busted long-standing myths around Britain being a cesspit of racism — and stood up to Black Lives Matter bullies.
I worked with her when I sat on this commission, and her unfaltering determination to speak truth to power was as impressive then as it has been in this race.
When she worked in the Equalities Office, she stood up for women by fending off pressure to allow biological men to legally self-identify as women at their own whim.
She has managed to run rings around leadership rival Penny Mordaunt over trans rights.
And there’s the fact she stands in stark contrast to the usual “Tory types”.
The ‘hope’ candidate
Raised in Nigeria, she came here as a 16-year-old, working shifts at McDonald’s to earn a living.
Yes, she has never held a Cabinet position, but that has made her performance in this contest even more extraordinary.
In the very first round of ballots, she outperformed candidates who had held five Cabinet posts between them.
The second ballot saw her oust Attorney General Suella Braverman, the darling of the influential pro-Brexit ERG group of Tories.
In the third round she was a mere 13 votes away from Foreign Secretary Liz Truss.
Given that Truss has been scoring trade deal wins and, more recently, standing up to Vladimir Putin in her role as Foreign Secretary, that Kemi posed such a threat to her says a lot.
While the other candidates in this race have been fighting among themselves over the country’s fiscal future, trying to land blows on whose tax plans were better, a star has quietly been born.
Almost by stealth, Kemi has emerged from the wreck of the Tory implosion as the candidate to be both feared and revered, with a vision for Britain that stretches far beyond mere tax rates
She has been the candidate of common sense, resisting any woke nonsense that has been thrown at her, both in her personal and professional life.
She has been the “hope” candidate, showing that Britain is a country where a young black woman who one day dreams of becoming Prime Minister CAN do it — and without the identity politics that comes with it.
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Many see Kemi as the surprise package of the contest. This is an understatement.
The woman has risen like a phoenix from the ashes of a Tory Party going up in smoke and restored hope to many who have lost faith in the Conservatives.