Kemi Badenoch's life from moving to UK with £100 to hacking a rival's website

Leader of the opposition Kemi Badenoch is facing her first big test in today's local elections, which sees 1,641 seats being hotly contested across 23 different authorities. Four regional mayors and two local mayors are set to be elected too, with a by-election choosing a new MP for the constituency of Runcorn & Helsby after the ex-Labour MP Mike Amesbury resigned.

And experts are warning the 45-year-old Tory leader could be facing electoral wipeout, predicting the Conservatives could lose hundreds of councillors to Reform and the Liberal Democrats.

Professor Sir John Curtice told The : "In taking votes from the Conservatives, Reform could simply help the , who always do better in local elections than in the national polls, take key seats from 's party, such as in Oxfordshire. Despite the party's current unpopularity, even might pick up some Tory seats too, with Nottinghamshire a key target."

Kemi herself said: "It will be the first time since the general election, the greatest defeat in all parties' history, that we fight these seats." The politician became Leader of the Opposition in November 2024, the first black leader of any major UK political party and the fourth woman to head up the Conservative Party. We take a look at how it happened...

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Kemi was born Olukemi Olufunto Adegoke in Wimbledon, South West London but soon moved to Nigeria with her parents - her GP father Femi and university academic mother Feyi - where she spent her childhood.

At the age of 16, the teenager returned back to Wimbledon to live with a longstanding friend of her mother, Dr Abiola Tilley Gyado, "for a better future" as she studied for A levels in maths, chemistry and biology.

Kemi had arrived back in the UK with just £100 in her pocket and worked at McDonald's part time for extra income. "Dad spent several months' pay on my plane ticket," she in 2017. "We went to the travel agent with all his savings stuffed in a plastic carrier bag.

"He had £100 left when he'd paid for my ticket and he gave it to me to take to England. So that's all I had when I arrived."

The future politician would later say she believed Black students were treated differently at her school, saying she was steered away from applying to study medicine at Oxford University as she "wouldn't get in" and was also asked: "Have you considered nursing?" despite her explaining both of her parents were doctors.

The politician went onto Sussex University to study Computer Systems Engineering, completing her Master of Engineering degree in 2003. She secured a job in banking and joined the the same year, at the age of 25.

According to Kemi's student boyfriend Nkem Ifejika, her time on campus impacted her political leaning as she believed the left-wing students at her university "didn't understand Africa".

"I was disturbed by attitudes that didn't allow Africans and Black people agency," she later said in an interview. "It's something that has stayed with me. I'm very suspicious of people who claim to be wanting to help Black people and Africans but really are just virtue-signalling."

At the time of her return to the UK at the age of 16, no Black or Asian citizen had ever been a Government minister and Femi said being patronised by careers advisors who didn't value African voices made her a "very angry young person" who was inspired to get involve in politics.

Politics was also the place she met her husband Hamish Badenoch, a fellow Tory activist who would give her lifts when she stood against Labour's Tessa Jowell in Dulwich and West Norwood in the 2010 .

The Cambridge-educated banker was himself a political hopeful before becoming his future wife's campaign manager. The couple married in 2012 and have three children.

Shortly before Kemi became the MP for Saffron Walden in 2017, it was reported the supporter had once hacked into the website of Labour's Harriet Harman some ten years before. Harriet received a written apology for what Kemi called a "harmless prank".

"It was a summary offence at the time, the same as a speeding ticket," she last year.

"It was actually something quite different from what the law is now. And this was something that happened ten years before I was a member of parliament. It was very amusing at the time. Now that I'm an MP, it's a lot less amusing."

Lord Ashcroft's biography Blue Ambition revealed that in 2006 Kemi had come close to fighting with a member of the public in a Conservative party event at Oxford Town Hall. Working on a policy group on the issue of international aid, she was reportedly slapped on the face before giving chase.

"I caught her by the hair and pulled her back and then I realised most people in the room would not have seen the slap, just a 26-year-old black girl holding this old white woman and looking like she was about to beat her," said Kemi. The politician never saw the woman again and it didn't impact her career - she went on to secure a safe seat in an area now known as North West Essex.

Roles as the party's vice-chair as well as working in the departments for children and families, international trade, Treasury, equalities and local government ensued before Kemi became a cabinet member under short-lived Conservative Prime Minister and continued under her successor . Kemi backed in the 2019 Tory leadership contest before joining other ministers by quitting in 2022, to trigger the downfall of .

Now the Conservative Party leader herself, Kemi has remained outspoken, controversially sacking Post Office chairman Henry Staunton when she was a cabinet minister covering business and equalities. In 2023 she accused MP Kate Osborne of lying in a row about trans issues and another famous fallout was with star David Tennant.

The actor said at the British LGBT awards last year: "Until we wake up and doesn't exist any more - I don't wish ill of her, I just wish her to shut up". "I will not shut up," Kemi retaliated on X. "A rich, lefty, white male celebrity so blinded by ideology he can't see the optics of attacking the only black woman in government by calling publicly for my existence to end."