Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch has revealed she once got a child expelled from school for cheating on an exam.
Opening up about her childhood in Nigeria, the Tory leader said when she was “about 14 or 15″ she stood up in an exam and pointed to a boy, saying: “’he’s cheating, he’s the one that’s doing it’, and that boy ended up getting expelled.”
Mrs Badenoch, attempting to explain her hatred of rule-breakers, continued: “‘I didn’t get praised for it.
“I was a relatively popular kid at school, and people said ‘why did you do that, why would you do it?’”
Speaking to the BBC, she continued: “I said ‘because he was doing the wrong thing’.”
In the same interview, the Tory leader revealed learning the crimes of Austrian sex offender Josef Fritzl caused her to lose her faith in God.
Mrs Badenoch revealed she was “never that religious” but always “believed there was a God” and “would have defined myself as a Christian apologist”.
But her feelings changed in 2008 when she learned Fritzl had imprisoned and repeatedly raped his daughter, Elisabeth, in his basement for over 24 years.
“I couldn’t stop reading this story. And I read her account, how she prayed every day to be rescued,” she added.
“And I thought, I was praying for all sorts of stupid things and I was getting my prayers answered,” she told the BBC.
“I was praying to have good grades, my hair should grow longer, and I would pray for the bus to come on time so I wouldn’t miss something.
“It’s like, why were those prayers answered and not this woman’s prayers? And it just, it was like someone blew out a candle.”
Despite this “rejection of god”, Mrs Badenoch insists she not rejected Christianity and remained a “cultural Christian”, saying she wanted to “protect certain things because I think the world that we have in the UK is very much built on many Christian values”.
Mrs Badenoch also said her tenure as Conservative leader was going “well”, adding her job was to “make sure that people can see that we are the only party on the centre-right”.
In an apparent dig at Nigel Farage’s Reform UK, she said: “There are pretenders. We’re the only party on the centre-right, and we’re the only ones who still believe in values like living within our means, personal responsibility, making sure that the government is not getting involved in everything so it can focus on the things it needs to look at, like securing our borders.”
She went on to defend previous comments saying the fact she had worked at McDonald’s made her working class, saying: “I had to work to live.
“That, for me, is what being working class is. It’s the lifestyle that you have. You have to work, to survive.”
By Henry Moore
