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…
