July 4, 2024, Independence Day in the US and election day in the UK, will probably mark the next step in the progress of Kemi Badenoch to becoming the first British-African Prime Minister of the United Kingdom. She has all the requirements of a modern political leader: a first class-mind, a clear vision, and a loathing of the meaningless letter-salad that is LGBTQI+/BLM/#MeToo.
As a woman of African origins, she is naturally expected by the liberal-left to have certain opinions: this presumption is unadulterated racist witchcraft, peddled by people who are too stupid or too dogmatic to understand what free-thinking consists of.
In particular, she has pointedly refuted the gross falsehoods of transgenderism, which has made her a legitimate target among the left-wing who enjoy their inclusive socialism in the multi-million pound houses of North London.
These idiots really do believe that sexual orientation and gender dysphoria are part of a natural and unbroken spectrum, which is rather like saying that blindness is an expression of sightedness that is both legitimate and praiseworthy.
The actor David Tennant recently wooed (naturally, to approving ooh and aahs) an audience at an LBGT awards ceremony in London by attacking her. He declared, “Everyone has the right to be who they want to be and live their life how they want to live it …because it’s common sense, isn’t it?” He was hoping for the day when “Kemi Badenoch doesn’t exist anymore. I don’t wish ill of her, I just wish her to shut up.”
Probably, like most actors, Tennant, known for playing the tenth Dr Who and Time Lord in a long-running science fiction television programme (probably because he believes in such fantasies), also believes that people can be whatever sex they want.
He recently played Macbeth in the travesty of a production in London’s West End. Here audience-members were given radio headphones to hear the actors, while the Highland warlords – who in life would have been ferocious claymore-wielding savages – were all played by skinny teenage actresses in black leggings.
That said, Shakespeare did allow one reference to transgenderism, as Lady Macbeth cries, “Come, you spirits, That tend on mortal thoughts, unsex me here, And fill me from the crown to the toe top-full Of direst cruelty.”
But for the modern North London Left, transgenderism is not how Shakespeare saw it, from toe to crown full of direst cruelty, but more like an LGBTQ+ menu in a fantasy identity-restaurant: a first course, a trans-Innuit, with a touch of Balsamic, no olive oil, a main course of Queerdom with mango jus, and a pudding of Aboriginal Lesbian, no dressing.
Meanwhile Badenoch’s world is real, as the world of Tennant and his friends never will be: A-level exams at Phoenix College London while working at a McDonalds, later a master’s in computer-engineering at Sussex University, next working as a software engineer while reading law at Birkbeck College, next a systems analyst with the Royal Bank of Scotland, and later an associate director at Coutts Bank. Badenoch versus Tennant is not chalk and cheese but a supernova versus a dead glow-worm.
Her background is not irrelevant. She is of the Yoruba tribe, which created one of the most culturally sophisticated civilisations in the world and which specialised in terracotta, stone, alloy, and copper sculpture.
Western smiths had found they could not work copper, because it formed into solid crusts in contact with air. But a thousand years ago, Yoruba smiths uniquely learned how to mould copper by excluding air. This complex technological discovery enabled them to make true artistic masterpieces, most of which have been lost, but some remain, such as the astonishing head of Obalufon II, dated from 1300 A.D and now in the National Museum Lagos.
This rich and ornate civilisation was in time nearly destroyed by Fulani slave-traders, until it was saved by the British Empire’s war against slavery, to which evil the Empire had of course earlier been party.
The Empire’s role in ending slavery was one reason why so many Yoruba converted to Anglicanism, including the former slave who chose the name Samuel Crowther. He translated the Book of Common Prayer into Yoruba before earning a doctorate in divinity at Oxford and finally becoming the first African Bishop of West Africa, as personally authorised by Queen Victoria.
This was no doubt why Badenoch has taken such a measured approach to the legacy of the British Empire, some of which was excellent, and some of which was vile.
Naturally, she has been denounced by people who prefer mythical stereotypes to historical truth, which sometimes emerges in unexpected ways. One example: on July 24 falls the anniversary of the death on active service in 1944 of a 20-year old Nigerian, RAF Sergeant Adolphus Sylvanus Akinpelu Johnson. In their grief, his parents, Horatio Victor Emmanuel and Ruby Demi, had this inscribed on his gravestone in Cambridge: “(Our) dear son Adolphus, born at Lagos, Nigeria, Ajamu Ogun (‘Civil War’ in Yoruba) Good night we shall meet again.”
That “Horatio Victor” of the father was not coincidental. The Royal Navy’s victory at Trafalgar cleared the way for the British ultimately to end the transatlantic slave trade. The young son of the grieving parents gave his life for the freedom of the people of the UK, who this week, nearly eighty years after his death, are going to the polls.
We all know that the Tories are heading for a much-deserved electoral trouncing after fourteen years of administrative incompetence, deceit and dishonesty. However, we similarly know that the victorious Labour Party is dedicated to voodoo-politics: to identity-worship and gender-fluidity, plus gender and racial quotas.
This deranged agenda will almost certainly be imposed by politicised judges, rather like the tyrannical Rule of the Major Generals under Cromwell.
The UK now faces years of social engineering by a party that is as ideological as it was under Corbyn, though now on juju identity rather than Marxism. Labour’s leader Keir Starmer, who four years ago publicly genuflected in deference to George Floyd (of blessed memory), is adamant: not all men have penises and not all women have cervixes, and no doubt, gravity and buoyancy are matters of choice.
However, within the Tories, the genes of personal freedom still exist. The person best suited to relight its torch is the spiritual heir of Queen Victoria’s Bishop George Crowther, of Churchill’s RAF Sergeant Adolphus Sylvanus Akinpelu Johnson and not least of all, of Margaret Thatcher.
And when Kemi Badinoch finally leads the Tories to victory, of the actor who once so disgracefully traduced her, a handful of people might wonderingly ask, Doctor Who?
Kevin Myers is an Irish journalist, author and broadcaster. He has reported on the wars in Northern Ireland, where he worked throughout the 1970s, Beirut and Bosnia.
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