Great and Unfortunate Things?

Jason Arday is still only 41 and likely to make it big in showbusiness soon enough, so he could yet become Prime Minister. There has been many such a Count Binface: Boris Johnson, Volodymyr Zelensky, Donald Trump, and indeed Nigel Farage, who finds that tastes have changed and that he will have to give up television for provincial panto and seaside summer season. Tony Blair’s lies about watching Jackie Milburn or stowing away to the Bahamas did not preclude his progress. Whatever may have denied Hillary Clinton the Presidency, it was barely, if at all, her obviously false claims to have been named after Sir Edmund Hillary and to have been under sniper fire in Bosnia.

For now, though, Kemi Badenoch no longer professes to have been “born in a country that was 50 per cent Muslim”, presumably Nigeria, having lately told both Piers Morgan and Nick Robinson that she had been born in London. Her British citizenship depended on her having been born in the United Kingdom before Margaret Thatcher had abolished birthright citizenship. Badenoch may have been naturalised, and as a Commonwealth citizen she would be eligible to vote and stand in elections in this country and to hold office all the way up to Prime Minister. But that was not how she presented herself until 28 April. Badenoch also failed to mention that her Muslim grandmother had converted to Christianity. And even as, on the other side, the granddaughter of a Methodist minister, Badenoch claims to have taken part in Islamic Friday prayers, “because that was what happened there when I was in school.” Really? Like a lot of churchgoers in this country these days, I know Nigerian Christians, and again I ask, “Really?”

While still in Nigeria at the age of 16, Badenoch could not possibly have been offered a place on a pre-med course at Stanford but had to decline it because the scholarship did not pay enough, since Stanford did not offer a pre-med course. It is wildly unlikely that she really did have to take in her own chair to her elite private school in Lagos, or that her well-connected, urban family really did have to go without water and electricity. Even Lord Ashcroft had to concede that she had simply made up her claim to have been physically assaulted by a woke white women for being a black Conservative. It is, however, true that that scourge of social media for the coming-of-age criminally hacked the website of the then Leader of the House of Commons and Deputy Leader of the Labour Party, Harriet Harman. Think on.