Kemi Badenoch’s victory in the Conservative Party leadership contest marks a number of milestones in British political history.
She is the first black woman to lead a major political party and only the second woman to serve as permanent Leader of the Opposition after Margaret Thatcher.
Most strikingly, perhaps, Mrs Badenoch is the first major party leader to identify as a “first generation immigrant”.
She was born Olukemi Olufunto Adegoke in Britain in January 1980 after her Nigerian parents travelled to a specialist maternity hospital in south London to receive private healthcare.
After their daughter was born, the Adegokes returned to Nigeria where Mrs Badenoch grew up.
But because she was born in Britain before a Thatcher-era change to citizenship laws, Olukemi, known as “Kemi”, later found she was able to claim British citizenship, a discovery she has likened to finding out she possessed one of Willy Wonka’s “Golden Tickets”.
In 1996, during one of the country’s periodic political and economic crises, she returned to Britain aged 16 to live with a family friend in Wimbledon and study A-levels while working part-time in McDonald’s.
Mrs Badenoch has described her childhood in Lagos, Nigeria’s largest city, as “middle-class” when compared to her “very poor” surroundings. Her father Femi worked in the city as a GP while her mother Feyi was a professor of physiology at the University of Lagos.
“Being middle class in Nigeria still meant having no running water or electricity, sometimes taking your own chair to school,” she has said.
In her maiden speech as an MP she described “living without electricity and doing my homework by candlelight, because the state electricity board could not provide power, and fetching water in heavy, rusty buckets from a borehole a mile away, because the nationalised water company could not get water out of the taps.”
Mrs Badenoch has recalled doing manual labour as part of her high school education. “Mostly it meant getting up at 5am and cutting grass endlessly. Everyone had their own machete. Because that’s how you cut grass in Africa. There were no lawn mowers. We had to tend our own patches. I still feel as if I have got the blisters.”
She has said the blight of corruption in the Nigeria of her childhood helped form her political opinions. Mrs Badenoch also remembers being inspired by Margaret Thatcher as a girl, when she was often prohibited from participating in certain school activities because of her sex.
After taking A-levels in maths, biology and chemistry, she embarked on a computer systems engineering course at Sussex University.
She joined the Conservative Party in 2005, partly because of her irritation with the “stupid Lefty white kids” she encountered at university.
Mrs Badenoch met her husband, investment banker Hamish Badenoch, in her local south London Conservative association in 2009.
He was a member of the association which selected her as a parliamentary candidate in the 2010 general election. She came third in the Dulwich and West Norwood seat, losing out to Labour grandee Tessa Jowell.
The pair struck up a friendship after realising they had been born in the same Wimbledon hospital and soon became a couple. They married in 2012 at a Catholic church in Mayfair, before travelling to Lagos for a traditional Nigerian wedding ceremony. They have two daughters and a son.
Mr Badenoch was elected as a Conservative councillor in 2014 and served until 2018. Reportedly, the couple had an understanding that whichever one of them achieved national office first would take the lead with their political career, while the other would carry on in their non-political job.
She worked at Coutts Bank and The Spectator before being elected as a Conservative member of the London Assembly in 2015 and later Tory MP for Saffron Walden in 2017. Mr Badenoch continues to work in banking.