I joined the Conservatives for the partying, says Kemi Badenoch

Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch has said she initially joined the Conservatives for the “party aspect of it – socialising, drinks, hanging out with other young people”.

Speaking to BBC Radio 4’s Desert Island Discs, Badenoch said that after university all her friends had “gone all over the world” and she thought joining the party would be “a fun thing to do”.

She met her husband through her membership of the Conservatives and dedicated one of her record picks – Wet Wet Wet’s Love is All Around – to him.

The interview was recorded on 19 January, a week after three high-profile Conservatives had defected to Reform UK including former minister Robert Jenrick.

Asked how she would steady the Tory ship, Badenoch said: “I think defections are part of the ship being steadied.

“And while it is always sad to lose people who used to be on the team, losing people who were not team players and were more focused about their own personal ambition rather than the country’s ambition is actually helpful for showing what kind of party we are.”

Badenoch took over leadership of her party in 2024 following its worst-ever general election defeat.

Since then her party has fallen in the opinion polls, being overtaken by Reform UK, and suffered big defeats in the 2025 local elections.

Badenoch said the Conservative Party had been around for more than 200 years and that after being elected leader in 2024 her “mission” was to “make sure that we didn’t just disappear”.

She added she had a “long-term strategy” to win back voters but there would be “setbacks in between”.

“Quite often, the thing you’re doing for the long term is not that helpful in the short term.”

Her musical choices for the programme included The Story of Tonight from the musical Hamilton and Baz Luhrmann’s Everybody’s Free (To Wear Sunscreen).

She said the Australian film director’s 1997 spoken word song contained advice that was still “relevant” and was “very sympathetic to politicians”.

“It says ‘accept certain inalienable truths – prices will rise, politicians will philander and you too will get old’.”

“I always thought about that as being very helpful in thinking about life going quickly. I will get old too. What do I want?”

Explaining why she picked The Story of Tonight – a number in which revolutionaries in the American War of Independence sing about the future and friendship – Badenoch said it reminded her of the first time she ran to be leader of the Conservative Party in 2022.

“I had a group of friends, a renegade group of junior ministers, who had all resigned because we were so frustrated that the politics wasn’t working.

“They said you’ve got to stand, you’re the only one that would do well and we will support you.

“And I said, this is a mad idea. It’s not going to work and they said, don’t worry, we’re all in it together and if we look stupid, we’ll all look stupid together.”

Badenoch was part of the mass resignation of ministers that forced Boris Johnson out of office in July 2022.

Badenoch began her parliamentary career when she won the Essex seat of Saffron Walden for the Conservatives in 2017.

Asked how she managed to convince local Conservatives to select her as their candidate despite having no links to the area, she said: “They tell me that I was funny, I was very honest, I wasn’t trying to be something I wasn’t.”

“I started off by saying I could pretend that my family has been here since, you know, the Battle of Hastings, but I don’t think anyone here would believe me – and they just burst out laughing.

“They said later on that this is someone who’s just herself. And Essex is like that.

“Essex is very much my personality – I call myself an Essex girl.”

She said her father, who died in 2022 a few months before she ran for the first time for the Conservative leadership, was proud that she had gone into politics telling her: “I know you’re going to go all the way.”

By contrast, she said her mother was “tearing her hair out” when Badenoch embarked on a political career.

“She was like, why would you do this… you’ve got a good job… why do you want to go into this horrible career.

“She had a very, very dim view of politicians thinking they were all out for themselves… so I think part of what I’m trying to do now in politics is to prove to her that politicians can be good people.”

Badenoch was born in London but spent much of her childhood in Nigeria, as well as the United States, where her mother lectured.

However, she says her upbringing was steeped in British culture adding: “My childhood was sort of the last embers of empire and the colonial era.”

“Everything on telly was BBC,” she said, adding that she grew up watching the sitcom Some Mothers Do Ave Em and Doctor Who, which ignited a love of science fiction. For her luxury she picked the 22 “Marvel universe” superhero films.

As a child, she also read Enid Blyton’s Malory Towers books, which follow the lives of girls at a Cornish boarding school in the 1940s and 50s.

The books, she said, gave her an unrealistic expectation of what her own boarding school would be like.

“It was more like Lord of the Flies or Borstal,” she said, adding that every girl there had a machete, in order to cut the grass.

You can listen to the full episode of Desert Island Discs on Radio 4 at 11:00 GMT and after that on BBC Sounds.