Kemi Badenoch’s husband has one thing in common with Sir Denis Thatcher. They both met their wife while they were Tory activists and their future bride was fighting a safe Labour seat.
Hamish Badenoch would regularly give Kemi a lift in his car when she was Tory candidate against Labour’s Tessa Jowell in Dulwich and West Norwood in the 2010 general election.
And Denis Thatcher famously gave the young Margaret Roberts a lift home to London in his sports car when she was the Tory candidate in Dartford, which she fought in the 1950 and 1951 elections.
But the similarity probably ends there. Sir Denis went on to become a national celebrity in his own right, satirised in a “Dear Bill” column in Private Eye and a West End play “Anyone for Denis?”
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Hamish Badenoch, on the other hand, has kept a remarkably low profile, rather like another Tory activist-turned-PM’s spouse, Sir Philip May, who was described by wife Theresa as her “rock”.
And so, in shunning the limelight – so far – Mr Badenoch is definitely more Philip May than Denis Thatcher, though the extrovert and endearingly eccentric Sir Denis was a one-off among PM’s spouses.
But one highly unusual and notable fact about Hamish Badenoch is that he and Kemi, by a bizarre coincidence, were born in the same hospital, St Teresa’s in Wimbledon, a year apart.
It was partly this coincidence that led to them striking up a friendship when he was an activist in the Dulwich and West Norwood Tory association. He then became her campaign manager.
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“Hamish lived very near Kemi in Herne Hill and because he had a car and Kemi didn’t he volunteered to pick her up and drop her off when we had meetings,” a former association member revealed in Lord Ashcroft’s biography, Blue Ambition.
After head boy at Ampleforth College – the Roman Catholic boarding school run by monks – and Cambridge University, Hamish had a varied early career overseas: a journalist in Malawi, a management consult in Nigeria and running an Avis car hire franchise in Kenya.
After that and returning to London, it was the more traditional Tory background of Barclays Bank and now Deutsche Bank.
But like Kemi, he had political ambitions and in 2005, while he was a councillor in Merton, south London, he fought the SDLP-held seat of Foyle in Northern Ireland for the Conservatives.
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But it didn’t go well. Despite his Scottish Gaelic surname and boasting of Irish roots – his mother was born in the Republic of Ireland – he came seventh out of seven candidates and polled just 132 votes and lost his deposit. It was the one and only time he stood for parliament.
In 2016, the couple were on different sides in the EU referendum: she was pro-Brexit, he campaigned for Remain. Lord Ashcroft quoted a friend describing him as a “Cameron centrist”.
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Lord Ashcroft quoted another friend declaring: “Anyone who claims she doesn’t understand the One Nation wing of the party is reminded that she wakes up beside a Remainer every morning.”
On Kemi standing for the Tory leadership, a friend told Lord Ashcroft: “Hamish and she are like a team. He put her career ahead of his own. If he said to her that he didn’t think her being leader would work for the family, she wouldn’t do it.”
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Well, she did it and she’s done it. And when she thanked him in her victory speech and said she couldn’t have done it “without you being with me every step of the way”, the MPs and activists in the room cheered loudly.
Hamish Badenoch may have shunned the limelight until now. But now he’s been thrust right into it. Even if he’s hoping to be more Philip May than Denis Thatcher.
