Badenoch began her parliamentary career when she won the Essex seat of Saffron Walden for the Conservatives in 2017.<\/p>\n
Asked how she managed to convince local Conservatives to select her as their candidate despite having no links to the area, she said: “They tell me that I was funny, I was very honest, I wasn’t trying to be something I wasn’t.”<\/p>\n
“I started off by saying I could pretend that my family has been here since, you know, the Battle of Hastings, but I don’t think anyone here would believe me – and they just burst out laughing.<\/p>\n
“They said later on that this is someone who’s just herself. And Essex is like that.<\/p>\n
“Essex is very much my personality – I call myself an Essex girl.”<\/p>\n
She said her father, who died in 2022 a few months before she ran for the first time for the Conservative leadership, was proud that she had gone into politics telling her: “I know you’re going to go all the way.”<\/p>\n
By contrast, she said her mother was “tearing her hair out” when Badenoch embarked on a political career.<\/p>\n
“She was like, why would you do this… you’ve got a good job… why do you want to go into this horrible career.<\/p>\n
“She had a very, very dim view of politicians thinking they were all out for themselves… so I think part of what I’m trying to do now in politics is to prove to her that politicians can be good people.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Badenoch began her parliamentary career when she won the Essex seat of Saffron Walden for the Conservatives in…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":388990,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[59,57,58,50,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-388989","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-united-kingdom","tag-gb","tag-great-britain","tag-greatbritain","tag-news","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/388989","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=388989"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/388989\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/388990"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=388989"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=388989"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=388989"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}