Kemi Badenoch's cousin 'killed himself after going down "rabbit hole"' (2025)

In a bizarre moment during an interview on BBC Breakfast, Kemi Badenoch was forced to defend herself for having not watched a Netflix show.

Presenters Charlie Stayt and Naga Munchettyseemed appalled last week to learn that the Leader of the Opposition had not seen Adolescence, which tells of a 13-year-old boy fatally stabbing a female classmate.The drama, they suggested, had raised the themes of 'toxic masculinity', smartphone use in schools, cyberbullying and online 'incel' culture.

Badenoch's response was typically feisty: 'In the same way I don't need to watch Casualty to know what's going on in the NHS, I don't need to watch a Netflix drama to understand what's going on. It's a fictional series.'

Quite right. But I can disclose that the Tory leader has an intensely personal knowledge of the horrors the internet can unleash on one family: her own. 'I worry a lot about social media,' she tells me in our exclusive interview at a London hotel, as her embattled party prepares to fight the local elections next month.

'I have a family member who was in his 20s and went down an internet "rabbit hole". He was exploring pro-mortalism and anti-natalism – and killed himself.'

Pro-mortalism is a bleak philosophy that argues it would be ethical to kill all humanity to prevent global suffering, while anti-natalism insists that having children is wrong. 'I hadn't heard of either of them,' says Badenoch. 'But I saw what excessive internet use can do.'

The Tory leader has never spoken publicly before about this traumatic family tragedy.

Her cousin, who was living alone in Canada, prepared a detailed and graphic suicide note at the end of 2022 describing his descent into the dark web.

'He wrote the most extraordinary lucid letter but ended his own life,' says Badenoch, her voice cracking with emotion. 'It's heartbreaking. My views about the dangers of social media are not just about children. I know even as adults we can get dangerously addicted.'

The sudden loss of her young cousin three years ago is one of the reasons Badenoch is closely considering following Australia's lead and banning children under 16 from social media.

'It's an area our policy review will look at,' she says. As for her own internet use, she admits to watching 'funny reels' on Instagram for up to 30 minutes at a time. 'If adults find it addictive, what chance do kids have?'

But if she wants to do anything in government, she has to win power first.

And that will not be easy. Badenoch, 45, is struggling in the polls after five months as leader.Keir Starmer's administration may be widely unpopular, but a YouGov survey this week puts the Tories on just 21 per cent, against Labour's 24 and Nigel Farage's Reform at 23 per cent.

Inevitably, there are whispers she could face a leadership challenge if next month's local elections are the disaster many predict for the Conservatives.

She has repeatedly ruled out a pact or merger with Farage's party, but refuses to be drawn specifically on the Reform threat at the upcoming elections. When I ask her about Reform, she jokes: 'Yes, I will "reform" the Civil Service – but I'm not worrying about other people at this stage.'

Yet when it comes to the dangers of mass migration, she is emphatic. 'Multiculturalism is not working,' she says. 'People who come here have to assimilate our values and not try to change them.'

I can reveal Badenoch is setting up a major policy commission to find solutions to deal with successive governments' failure to integrate millions of immigrants.

She will assemble a panel of experts to examine, among other things, why the taxpayer spends tens of millions of pounds each year on translation services in the NHS and education, rather than requiring migrants to learn English.

I'm assured the make-up of the panel will be unusual for a Conservative inquiry, with a Tory source saying: 'You might be surprised by some of the people on the commission.'

She asks me: 'Are the people coming here making Britain successful? Or do they just want to exploit what we have? Working hard is one thing – but do the migrants want the country to succeed?'

Tory leaders have repeatedly followed a Blairite approach, paying self-appointed 'community leaders' grants to foster social cohesion. 'It's not working,' Badenoch insists.'Nihilism is creeping in.'

Pointing to the case of Southport killer Axel Rudakubana, she says: 'The child of [Rwandan] asylum seekers should have been in love with our country. Instead he went down a nihilist route.

'A lot of people think it's not our duty to police how people integrate in this country, but it is. Look what happened with the grooming gangs, where we ignored the harm being done.'

Badenoch herself is clearly an integration success story, but some on the Right will inevitably question whether a Nigerian immigrant, albeit one born in London, is the best person to warn about mass migration.

I ask her if she worries that some Britons will not vote for her purely because of her race. 'There will always be people like that,' she concedes. 'I hate identity politics.The colour of your skin should not matter any more than the colour of your hair or eyes. We were getting there – and then this movement comes out of nowhere.'

What movement? She means the increasing tendency to see 'racism' everywhere – a trend that has accelerated in recent years and especially since the Black Lives Matter protests of 2020.

Badenoch points to the Wildlife and Countryside Link, a group of 80 organisations that last year argued the British countryside is a 'racist and colonial white space'.

'It's unbelievable!' she cries. 'Everything is "racist" now. The countryside is racist. All white people are racist. The people pushing these so-called "anti-racist" views have triggered a backlash which has fostered more racism.

'It is going to take moral courage to deal with this, but I will.'

As MP for North West Essex, she accepts that many Britons increasingly feel like strangers in their own communities. 'I have constituents who say they left their bit of East London because it wasn't the same place they grew up in.'

Olukemi Olufunto Adegoke was born in Wimbledon in January 1980 –almost by accident. Her mother Mary, a Christian professor of physiology in Nigeria's largest city Lagos, was undergoing treatment for endometriosis in London.

'I was delivered in a private Catholic clinic. Turns out my husband Hamish Badenoch was born in the same clinic exactly one year earlier. It felt like fate.'

Her grandfather was a Methodist minister and she went to a church girls' school. 'Hymns were a huge part of growing up.' Was she a good singer? 'Don't laugh, but I was a tenor. My voice was much deeper than the other girls.'

She was president of the school debating society and devoured Enid Blyton books which she now reads to her children: two girls aged five and 11 and an eight-year-old son, whose names she refuses to disclose.

In Nigeria, the Adegokes were comfortably off: home was a spacious flat above her GP father's clinic and they had several staff, including a driver. 'It wasn't Downton Abbey,' she insists. 'Extended members of the family would come to stay and help.'

But the middle-class idyll was shattered after a military coup in 1985 led to an oil price crash. 'Some families lost everything, which is where my fear of bad economic policies come from.

'I saw real poverty. I experienced living without electricity, doing homework by candlelight, fetching water in heavy rust buckets from a borehole a mile away, which we dug ourselves.

'The state-owned water company could not get water out of the taps. You may have natural resources, but if you have stupid policies you will lose them.'

Do those power cuts during her youth explain her opposition to the Labour Government's dash to Net Zero under Energy Secretary Ed Miliband? 'I came to Britain at 16 with £100 in my pocket,' she replies.

'The lights not going off here was a modern marvel to me. Most people my age in Britain have never experienced not knowing whether the electricity will come on. It's awful and I don't want it to happen here.'

Badenoch's mother urged her to move to England to stay with a family friend and continue her education after Nigeria's university lecturers had been on strike for a year.

While studying for her A-levels at college in Morden, south-west London, she worked at a branch of McDonald's, eating a Quarter Pounder every day for 18 months.

She tells me she can't look at them now, but her children have them as an occasional treat. 'I liked earning money and never spent enough time studying,' she admits. The results: a D grade in Maths and Bs in Chemistry and Biology.

'My father was furious. The college never pushed me hard enough. I wanted to be a doctor, they said be a nurse. There was a bigotry of low expectations.'

At Sussex University she studied Computer Engineering but it was not always a happy experience. 'I loved Brighton but the university was full of north London Lefties.'

Sussex is now notorious as the institution from which Professor Kathleen Stock was driven out in 2021 by Left-wing zealots accusing her of 'transphobia'.

Asked about this week's landmark Supreme Court ruling on the definition of a woman, Badenoch says: 'It is a Hallelujah moment. Internally, I punched the air.'

She adds: 'We never talked gender ideology at university but there was a Marxist interpretation of everything, with overblown anti-colonial rhetoric. Africans were referred to as if they were helpless and only the students could save them.

'It's the same stuff that drives Labour MPs today. [Foreign Secretary] David Lammy and Keir Starmer are still student politicians.' Her own political instincts were always clear. 'Margaret Thatcher was my inspiration. What a remarkable woman.'

Badenoch joined the Tories in 2005, voting for David Davis in the leadership contest against David Cameron.

She may have arrived several minutes early for our interview, but her opponents insist she's always late. 'They also say I'm lazy and hate mornings,' she laughs in response.

'I usually go to bed at 1am and have a maximum six hours' sleep, which is all you can expect with young children. I'm looking forward to when they're teenagers and sleep in.'

Today she is wearing one of her trademark blue dresses from The Fold, which retails for £400, while her white heels cost just £30 from Marks & Spencer.

She tells me it takes four hours to plait her hair every six weeks. 'I take a lot of work with me when I go to the salon.'

She admits she couldn't be Tory leader unless Hamish, who quit his well-paid job at Deutsche Bank when she beat Robert Jenrick to take over the party, had assumed most of the domestic chores.

He now manages an investment portfolio which means he often works from home.

Hamish also does most of the cooking, though Badenoch proudly says she did the honours last Saturday, preparing chicken in tomatoes: 'The first time I've cooked for a long time.'

The couple met at a Tory function in 2009 when she was a parliamentary candidate in Dulwich.

Was there an instant attraction? 'No, instant suspicion!' she quips. 'He was a posh public schoolboy and everyone assumed he wanted to take over from me as the candidate. The [relationship] was a slow burn. I would not be here without Hamish: he tells me about my deficiencies.

'I know I can come across as hard on people or flippant, but he will say, "Don't say that, try it this way instead". I was told in the leadership contest I was too confrontational and aggressive, so I've mellowed. He's influenced that.'

By her own admission, she doesn't spend enough time with their children. 'My five-year-old daughter said before I left the house this morning, "Mummy, tell the Prime Minister you're not coming in today".'

Her son is more interested in football, watching Crystal Palace with his father.

Badenoch is braced for a rough time after May 1's by-election in Runcorn and the mayoral and county council elections. She is acutely aware her party has become addicted to changing leaders: she's the fifth since 2019.

'Once, if you knocked on a door wearing a blue rosette, everyone knew what you were selling even if they didn't want it,' she says. 'In 2024 [under Rishi Sunak] we were selling a mishmash.

'We have to bring back authentic Conservative principles. If we do, the endless desire to change leader will calm down. We are in the last-chance saloon.'

As for her stilted performances at Prime Minister's Questions, she admits: 'I have learnt it's not a courtroom. I started with analysis and data and no one knew what I was talking about.

'I now realise it's a show, it's panto. I have to blend the two. Many people want the leader to be the finished product on day one but there's a lot of learning – and I still am.'

I'm learning, too. I've heard the criticisms of Badenoch: that she is charmless, lazy and doomed to lose. She is, in fact, clever, charming and gutsy.

After our interview, I looked up what Mrs Thatcher's critics were saying about her after her first six months as Leader of the Opposition. Most of the reports said she was doomed to failure and could never win a general election.

But look what happened next.