The story of how Kemi Badenoch, a black woman, emerged as the leader of the Conservative Party – a major political party in Britain – is quite inspiring but it also reminds us of the story of Chuka Umunna, another black British politician who some years ago had a similar chance of leading a major political party in Britain.
Both Chuka and Kemi share so much in common: they are in the same age bracket (Kemi is 44 while Chuka is 46); they are both lawyers who became parliamentarians in the UK in their 30s; and they are of Nigerian/African descent (Chuka was born to a Nigerian father and English-Irish mother, while both of Kemi’s parents are Nigerians. She became a British citizen only because her mother gave birth to her while on a medical trip to London).
Character-wise, however, there appear to be gulfs between Kemi and Chuka with the former having proven herself braver than the latter. In their respective political careers, both Kemi and Chuka have faced the same test but while Kemi ‘chested’ her challenge with admirable courage, Chuka shied away from his.
More than eight years before Kemi got to lead the Conservative Party in the UK, Chuka gambled a similar opportunity to lead the Labour Party – another major political party in Britain.
In 2015, Ed Miliband, then the leader of the Labour Party, resigned from the headship of the party. Ed Miliband’s resignation presented a golden opportunity for Chuka to become the leader of the party. At the time of Miliband’s resignation, Chuka was one of his closest and trusted allies in the party. It was Ed Miliband who appointed or facilitated Chuka’s appointments as the Parliamentary Private Secretary (in 2010), Shadow Minister for Small Business and Enterprise (in May 2011), Shadow Business Secretary, etc.
Apart from the advantage of being a close ally of the outgoing leader, Chuka was also a prominent figure in the party, under which he won and retained elections into the British parliament between 2010 and 2019. Outside of the party, Chuka’s impressive credentials as a young politician coupled with his charisma and savvy looks endeared him to members of the public, some of whom saw him as the ‘Britain’s Obama’ who was destined to lead Britain.
It was therefore not surprising that when Ed Miliband announced his resignation from the leadership of the Labour Party in 2015, the person that most people wanted to succeed Ed Miliband was Chuka. In an interview with Simon Hattenstone which was published by the Guardian on 16th June 2016, Chuka admitted this fact of being the favourite for his party’s leadership position when he stated as follows:
…a lot of people asking me to stand – people in the street, not just in my constituency. Secondly, I thought I had something different to offer. And thirdly, looking at the other people who were in line to do it, I thought I could do a good job.
Convinced about his chances, Chuka declared his intentions to contest for the leadership of the party four days after Ed Miliband’s resignation, but in a surprising twist in the plot, he later made a U-turn three days after, withdrawing his candidacy from the contest. According to him, he needed to protect himself and his family from being subjected to undue media attention and scrutiny. We would later find out from his interview with Hattenstone that the family Chuka spoke about was majorly his then-girlfriend, Alice Sullivan, whom he later married, a few months after he decided to withdraw from the contest. Hattenstone quotes him as having said the following words:
…I ended up meeting the person who makes me more happy than anything in the world… and I was not prepared to sacrifice that on the altar of politics. It’s as simple as that. I know there will always be speculation as to why I left the field. And if people don’t want to believe the story I’ve given, that’s fine. But if putting your family first, and putting the person you love first, is a problem for the British public, so be it. I can live with that.
Four years later, a regretful Chuka while reflecting on the missed opportunity in another interview with The Guardian (published on the 1st of March 2019) gave another excuse for his inability to grab the opportunity that came his way in 2015. Deviating from his earlier excuse of shielding his family or lover from media scrutiny, Chuka began to link his failures in the Labour Party to his mixed-cultural background which according to him was “a chain round his neck”. The Guardian quotes him as having said:
if truth be told, certainly culturally, I never felt totally comfortable in the Labour Party, because I’ve never really been a massively tribal politician.
Unfortunately for Chuka, none of the above excuses could exempt him from the consequences of that cowardly or injudicious decision of accepting defeat in a battle without a fight. Following that decision, his once-promising political career faced a decline as people no longer trusted his ability to handle the pressures of leadership.
Within a short period, Chuka lost his place as an influential member of the Labour Party which pushed him into forum-shopping for another political party.
In a failed move to survive his waning relevance, he defected from the Labour Party to The Independent Group Party in February 2019 and from the Independent Group to the Liberal Democrats in June 2019.
Within the same year, Chuka contested and lost an election to the seat of the Cities of London and Westminster, following which he took a detour to the business world by accepting a role with JPMorgan Chase.
As fate would have it, the same challenge which Chuka ran away from some years ago came knocking on Kemi’s door sometime this year when the former Prime Minister of the UK, Rishi Sunak, resigned his position as the leader of the Conservative Party.
Presented with a similar uphill task of contesting the leadership of a major British, Kemi Badenoch did not allow herself to be intimidated by the complex of being black in white-dominated politics. In her case, she did not only have to fight this racial complex; she also had to overcome the doubts of being a female player in a field full of men. Even more daunting for Kemi was the fact that she had to fight for the same position with five other candidates, including Robert Jenrick, the former Minister of State for Immigration.
Notwithstanding all the odds against her, Kemi did not chicken out like her black British brother – Chuka. She refused to see her racial background as a stumbling block to her ambition. She refused to play the victim card with her status as a woman. Rather than resort to such self-victimising antics, Kemi believed in herself and the validity of her dreams. She went after it with admirable courage and was able to break the same ground that Chuka thought was impervious.
Today, while Chuka bits his finger in regrets over his decision to quit the contest in 2015 (he told Hattenstone in the interview on The Guardian that he wouldn’t miss out on another opportunity to lead the party), the world celebrates Kemi Badenoch for being the first black woman to win an election to lead a major political party in Britain.
