Hamish Badenoch: the banker who sacrificed his political career to back wife

Hamish, a Remainer whose views reportedly differ from the Tory leader, has already been compared to Denis Thatcher

He is the high-flying investment banker who sacrificed his own political ambitions for his wife.
As Kemi Badenoch settles into her new role as Tory leader, her husband of 12 years Hamish, 45, will also be her closest political confidant who has already been likened to Denis Thatcher.
The pair met in the run-up to the 2010 election campaign as Mrs Badenoch fought for a Labour safe seat in Dulwich and West Norwood.
The attempt to overturn Tessa Jowell’s majority of about 9,000 may have been unwinnable, with the future Tory leader finishing third, but by the time the campaign had begun Kemi Adegoke and Hamish Badenoch were an item.
Like Mr Thatcher, Hamish Badenoch would regularly give his future wife a lift to and from meetings in his car as Denis did when a young Margaret Roberts was campaigning unsuccessfully in Dartford in 1950 and 1951.
Mr Badenoch was born in Wimbledon and was educated at Ampleforth, the North Yorkshire boarding school, where he became head monitor.
He later studied history at the University of Cambridge’s Trinity College, before starting a varied and successful career. After graduating he spent seven months working as a journalist for the Nation newspaper in Malawi before becoming a consultant, based in Lagos, Nigeria, and London.
He then went on to run the franchise of Avis, the car rental company, in Kenya before moving to investment banking.
It was while working for Barclays in London that he met his future wife, with the pair bonding over the fact that they were born at the same hospital St Teresa’s in Wimbledon a year apart.
He later became her campaign manager and although Mrs Badenoch has said “it wasn’t love at first sight” they grew close over time and “when I had tough times, he was always there, so we became friends”.
The couple, who now have three children together, married in September 2012 at Farm Street, a Catholic church in Mayfair, followed by a traditional Nigerian wedding in Lagos.
Both had political ambitions but it was Mr Badenoch who was first to be successful in an electoral campaign, becoming a councillor in the London borough of Merton in 2014 where he served until 2018.
According to Blue Ambition, Lord Ashcroft’s unauthorised biography of Mrs Badenoch, there was an understanding between the couple that if one of them were to be elected to Westminster, the other would pursue their professional career.
Mr Badenoch was nominated as a candidate in the May 2015 election, but he stood no chance of winning in Foyle, Northern Ireland, where the Conservatives were the only major London-based party to field candidates. He came last with 132 votes having pledged to move to Derry if he won.
His wife became a member of the London Assembly the same year before she was elected as the MP for Saffron Walden in June 2017.
She became the vice-chairman of candidates for the Conservatives and in doing so was left in a position where she was forced to end her husband’s political career.
“The first thing I did when I took on that role was I threw my husband off the list because I didn’t think it would look good if I was chair of candidates and he was applying for seats,” she said. “I recognised that there was a potential conflict of interest there and even though I wasn’t required to, I took additional steps to show that this was something that I took seriously.”
In a sign of some political differences between the pro-Brexit Tory leader and her husband, Mr Badenoch was by that time working as the programme lead for “Brexit People Migration” at Deutsche Bank, as the lender considered relocating employees to the EU.
However, friends have said their opposing views on some issues are an advantage and this makes Mr Badenoch “half the brains of the operation”.
“He is Kemi’s chief adviser and acts as a useful counterbalance to some of her views,” one is quoted as saying in Blue Ambition. “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.”