Kemi Badenoch has revealed how she once snitched on a fellow pupil for cheating in an exam – and it led to him being expelled from their school.
The Tory leader recalled, when she was ‘about 14 or 15’, how she stood up during the middle of an exam and said: ‘He’s cheating, he’s the one that’s doing it.’
‘That boy ended up getting expelled,’ Mrs Badenoch admitted, adding: ‘I didn’t get praised for it.
‘I was a relatively popular kid at school, and people said ‘why did you do that, why would you do it?’. I said ‘because he was doing the wrong thing’.’
The Conservative MP told the BBC that following the incident she was told ‘You don’t belong here, you don’t know how to behave’.
‘I’ve heard that all my life,’ she continued. ”You don’t follow the rules, you don’t do what you’re supposed to’.
”You’re always sticking your head above the parapet, you’re too direct, you tell the truth when you don’t need to tell the truth when you should pipe down’.’
Mrs Badenoch was born in Britain but spent her childhood in Nigeria and the US before she returned to the UK at the age of 16.
The Tory leader admitted she was a ‘swot’ at school and also ‘the tattle-tale in the class, getting people into trouble’.
‘Even then I hated cheating,’ she said. ‘I wanted to be first in the class, I’d done all the work.
‘And then there’s some people who are copying notes – why should they get away with it?’
Elsewhere in the BBC interview, Mrs Badenoch revealed how the case of Austrian sex offender Josef Fritzl caused her to lose her faith in God.
She said she was ‘never that religious’ while growing up but ‘believed there was a God’ and ‘would have defined myself as a Christian apologist’.
But this changed in 2008 when she read reports that Fritzl had imprisoned and repeatedly raped his daughter, Elisabeth, in his basement over 24 years.
Mrs Badenoch, whose maternal grandfather was a Methodist minister, said: ‘I couldn’t stop reading this story. And I read her account, how she prayed every day to be rescued.
‘And I thought, I was praying for all sorts of stupid things and I was getting my prayers answered.
‘I was praying to have good grades, my hair should grow longer, and I would pray for the bus to come on time so I wouldn’t miss something.
‘It’s like, why were those prayers answered and not this woman’s prayers? And it just, it was like someone blew out a candle.’
But Mrs Badenoch insisted that while she had ‘rejected God’, she had not rejected Christianity and remained a ‘cultural Christian’.
She said she wanted to ‘protect certain things because I think the world that we have in the UK is very much built on many Christian values’.
