Being a politician can be “hellish” - 10 things we learnt from Kemi Badenoch’s interview with Mumsnet

On Monday morning, Conservative leadership contender Kemi Badenoch MP sat down with Mumsnet founder and CEO Justine Roberts to answer questions from some of the site’s nine million users.  Here are ten things we learnt from the interview:

1 Sometimes being a politician can be “hellish” (and politicians should give each other “the benefit of the doubt”)

KB “I think we need to take a lot of the outrage out of politics. I think that it has become harder and harder to govern.  Because of social media, because the age of deference has disappeared, people have higher expectations, whatever party you're in. I think it is harder to govern. The problems are getting bigger and bigger. You know, COVID, a war in Europe, Brexit, financial crisis, these things used to happen once every 10 years, not once every two, three years. And what I want right now is for people to understand that being a politician is actually pretty difficult at the best of times. Sometimes it can be very hellish.  But if we give each other the benefit of the doubt, and that means even me giving Labour the benefit of the doubt, we can do a lot better than we have done before.” 

2 She doesn’t have a favourite of the past four Conservative PMs (or at least if she does, she’s not telling)

JR: “Who do you respect the most [out of Theresa May, Boris Johnson, Liz Truss and Rishi Sunak] and why?” 

KB: “I respect all of them for different things. I'm not going to pick my favourite. I don't think it is fair and because I got to know some of them better than others. They all had good points and they were all trying to do the best that they could, even when it didn't work out”.

3 She thinks too many Ministers are “scared” of the Civil Service

KB: “I do think that there is a left wing bias in the civil service, but nothing that would worry me generally. And actually the comments I made were saying that a lot of civil servants are magnificent. The civil service is like any workplace. There are some great people. Most people are there to just do the job and live their lives. And then I made a joke that 10% of them are magnificent but another 10% that are very, very bad, should be in prison bad. That was the joke I made, because they do things like leak official secrets and so on. Of course, that's a joke that's made just to highlight how you can't just put all civil servants in a bucket. I couldn't have gotten my job done without civil servants. What was actually really inspiring was that there were many gender critical civil servants when I was fighting the battles on the Gender Recognition Act and Self ID who said “thank you, we need your help. We have these other colleagues who are creating problems. We can't speak out”. Some of you might've heard about the SEEN network. So there are great people who are working there, but we need the ministers themselves to be tougher. And the point I've always made is that there's no point complaining about officials if you don't know what you want to do. Is there a left-wing bias? Yes, but you have to be able to say, this is my agenda. This is what I need you to deliver. If you can't do it, then go work somewhere else.  And too many ministers are scared of doing that. And some of them even think that the civil servants should tell them what to do because they don't really know how they got there in the first place. We have to stop that. We need people who know what they are there to do.”

4 She thinks the state should support women to have children - but only to a “certain extent”

KB: “Making sure that women are able to have their children without being worried about financial pressures is absolutely critical. I want to put that on the record first. But the question I was asked was, should the government do more on maternity pay to help women have more children. And I just don't think that government can make people have more kids with intervention. I don't think government even should be trying to encourage people to make those sorts of choices in that way. I think that we should all be having more children. I think children are amazing. They help us as we get older, in old age and so on. They create a lot of support for families. Family is absolutely critical, family is one of my values. But how do we do that in a way that is sustainable? What I was really trying to emphasise is that as Business Secretary, most businesses were saying, we can't cope with government regulation, that the number of things we're being asked to do is excessive, they should just trust us. We want our staff to do well, we will look after our staff, but the endless mandating of a whole bunch of things is making it too difficult.” 

5 She wants big tech to do more to protect kids on social media

KB: “I do not think children should be on social media really until they are 16, maybe even 18. But I say that because I wasn't on social media until I was about 24, 20 years ago. And I cannot imagine the pressure that they are facing.  When you have those children who get the social media and the phones taken away from them, they just start behaving differently. I see it with my children. When we banned the use of the devices, they're using our devices, by the way. No, you can't use my iPad. No, you can't use my phone. And you've got to go out and play. They just behave differently. They start listening to each other. They talk in a way that is reminiscent of how we all spoke when we were younger. And I worry that we're creating sort of these screen addicted children who don't understand what enjoyment is like unless they're getting an endorphin hit every five seconds. So I'm very supportive of bans on mobile phones in schools. For example, I picked a school for my daughter who's just started year seven, partly based on who has a very strict mobile phone policy. But I also think that the tech companies need to do better at how they are identifying what children do and what adults do.”

6 She thinks “there’s no Net Zero without nuclear”

KB: “Nuclear is the big thing that will help us to get to net zero. There's no net zero without nuclear. Wind and solar are parts of the mix, but one of the issues I have with the way that we have been carrying out the net zero policy is it's thinking very much in the short term about how do we get to net zero, but not enough of the medium to long term of what are the consequences. And one of the consequences is China.  We have China creating a huge economic threat to our country. I won't go into the stuff about the industrialisation. Otherwise I'll be on for another hour. But the way we are carrying out net zero now means that we're relying more and more on a country that has been collaborating to undermine us in many ways, you know, with spies and we have, you know, spies and so on. We've got to be very careful about how we deliver this. The solar has often been delivered by China.  The components and the rare metals that we need or the critical minerals that we need for electric vehicles, they've cornered a lot of the market. So I want us to do this in a sustainable way. Oil and gas will be part of the transition. Hydrogen is something that many people are optimistic about. You've heard me talk about nuclear. We want to have a mix of everything so that we're not reliant on fossil fuels in the future”.

7 Male violence against women and girls gives her “nightmares”

KB: “My feminism comes from a realisation that we as women are vulnerable, our bodies are weaker, that our biology creates a lot of difficulties for us, which men will never, never understand, you know, even with the best will in the world. And so there's a spectrum, you know, at the easy end, with people just understanding what we go through, pregnancy periods, menopause, and so on, they just don't get it. But the extreme end is the one that you're talking about. And it is something that honestly gives me nightmares. I worry about my children walking to school, my daughters, what sort of situations they can get into. And I think it is extraordinary how some people get away with extreme levels of violence and it looks like a slap on the wrist. I hate it when I see, you know, I read stories of women who are trapped in these unbelievably bad relationships and they can't get out. More tougher sentencing is important. That means building more prisons but also just looking at sentencing as a whole. I do think it's extraordinary that sometimes people get tough sentences for things that we think are minor misdemeanours, and then those who do awful things are released early. Some of the prisoners who come out of this early prisoner release should be in prison still, child abuse, etc. I think those who share images are treated as if it's just an online crime. It is just as violating as if it had happened physically because it never goes away. The image is shared and enjoyed by all sorts of perverts all across the world. We've got to tackle what is going on online. We've got to tackle the endless proliferation of porn that glorifies the abuse of women. So I have a problem with the way that porn is so accessible even to very young boys and it makes them think that this is something that is normal, that this is what women enjoy.  There is a whole swathe of the policy that we need to look at in this area that I'm very concerned about and I will definitely, definitely do work on if I'm Leader of the Opposition.”

8 She thinks big AI companies should properly compensate creators when they use their content

KB: “I believe in property rights.  If you have created intellectual property, you have a right to keep your property or earn an income from it if others choose to use it.  If OpenAI has scraped your [Mumsnet’s] content, in my view, they owe you some money. They probably owe you a lot of money, if you can't get shares in it. I think what many of these AI companies are doing is very dangerous. I think if you scrape public content, then you should not be owning it and it should be available freely to the public in the same way that people could go on Mumsnet without paying any money. I'm not on top of where the legislation is at. I don't know what this government wants to do. But when we were in government, we talked about AI safety. And it isn't just the people who own, you know, text on the web who are worried. I've met actors who are worried about their images being used and abused. A lot of the, you know, just the fake content that's being created, making people think that someone is saying something that they haven't done is actually quite dangerous.  Now, of course we want people to develop AI. It can solve a lot of problems. It can fix many things. But we need to make sure that we don't abandon the principles that helped us develop this country in the first place. And property rights, including intellectual property rights, are at the core of that. 

9 She sometimes misses having a “normal” job - but she thinks Labour’s new employment legislation is “scraping the bottom of the policy barrel”

KB: “I did have normal jobs in the past. Sometimes I miss it, just not being a public figure and being able to go into Sainsbury's without people asking me questions. But I do think that this [Labour’s workers’ rights reforms] is, I call it scraping the bottom of the policy barrel. The problem we have in the country now isn't that people don't have enough rights. We've done a lot, you know, even within the last government, flexible working, shared parental leave, and so on and so forth. What we really need now is for people to go out and work. We need people to start businesses, start your own businesses, be entrepreneurs, take some risks. The people who take risks experience the losses themselves. So we need to support them as much as possible. I don't think that what Labour is bringing in is going to make the economy any better.  I think it's just going to create a lot more conflict in the workplace. It's going to pit the private sector against the public sector, pit employers against employees. This is not the answer.” 

10 She’s been fuelled by Biscoff on the campaign trail

KB:  “I'm enjoying those Biscoff biscuits. They're very tasty right now, they are very moreish. So yes, that is what I've been eating”.