There is something strikingly different about Kemi Badenoch, the newly anointed Conservative Party leader. For a while I thought it might be that she is peculiarly old fashioned — a throwback to an age before the end of history and the professionalism of the Nineties. She speaks in a way that seems somehow more liberated and less calculating than her rivals, and more ideological. To her supporters, of course, this is the point — she is a new incarnation of the lady who will not turn. Though it could also make her the new Michael Foot.

Yet the more I think about it, the more obvious it becomes that while there is something of the lost Britain about Badenoch — I can’t think of another politician who has spoken to me of Some Mothers Do ‘Ave Em and Mind Your Language — what she really represents is a distinctive modern Britain that is not so much pre-Blair as post-Blair. She is the embodiment of the modern migration nation that is Britain in 2024.

There is something strikingly different about Kemi Badenoch, the newly anointed Conservative Party leader. For a while I thought it might be that she is peculiarly old fashioned — a throwback to an age before the end of history and the professionalism of the Nineties. She speaks in a way that seems somehow more liberated and less calculating than her rivals, and more ideological. To her supporters, of course, this is the point — she is a new incarnation of the lady who will not turn. Though it could also make her the new Michael Foot.

Yet the more I think about it, the more obvious it becomes that while there is something of the lost Britain about Badenoch — I can’t think of another politician who has spoken to me of Some Mothers Do ‘Ave Em and Mind Your Language — what she really represents is a distinctive modern Britain that is not so much pre-Blair as post-Blair. She is the embodiment of the modern migration nation that is Britain in 2024.

The most interesting thing about Badenoch, then, is not that she is the Conservative Party’s first black leader, but that she is its first immigrant leader. While Rishi Sunak was the first ethnic minority prime minister, he was not an immigrant. Another way to tell the Sunak story is that of the Winchester boy who went to the City via Oxford — living proof of George Orwell’s observation in The Lion and the Unicorn that England is “an aristocracy constantly recruited from parvenus”. Our aristocrats might appear more diverse today, but the basic settlement has not changed.

Badenoch, though, is different. She is the first Conservative Party leader to be raised in an entirely different country: Nigeria. And this is not because she was an expat or the child of diplomats, but because she was Nigerian. Though Britain was the land of her birth, it was principally the land that Badenoch chose to escape to as a teenager when her home country descended into chaos in 1996.

She thus represents something unique: a leader raised in post-colonial West Africa but who came of age in anti-colonial modern Britain. The result is a strikingly contemporary form of modern conservatism: a New Toryism, perhaps — a global Little Englandism. Badenoch’s politics are those of a middle-class Nigerian anglophile refracted through a world of alien English progressivism.

Speaking to her, it’s hard to avoid the sense that Roger Scruton was on to something when he came up with his theory about expats. The expat is destined to hold a candle for an idea of home that has, without him realising it, vanished long ago. Only upon returning to the motherland does the fantasy reveal itself, leaving the old expat homeless and yearning to resurrect the lost land of his imagination. Though Badenoch is not an expat, she seems to have carried with her an illusion of Britain that must have shattered quite quickly upon her arrival at the fag end of John Major’s government at the age of 16.

The legacy of Empire is “complicated” for Badenoch — not a source of humiliation for her, it seems, but a distant world whose shadow gently fell over her life. Her family, the Adegokes, were upper-class Nigerians doing just fine in post-colonial Africa, with a comfortable home in a well-to-do suburb of Lagos. That Kemi was even born in Britain is testament to this: her parents chose to have her in the safety of a private London hospital after a referral in Nigeria. Her childhood is not the story of struggle. And yet the reality of post-imperial Nigeria remained one of political and economic instability.

The Britain Badenoch arrived in in 1996 was not one of easy prosperity and wealth, even if it offered the kind of stability Nigeria lacked. On her arrival, Badenoch worked in McDonald’s, stayed with family friends and went to Sussex University. Her British story begins just as Tony Blair is about to become prime minister, riding on a wave of optimism about a new, outward-looking Britain, not only open to Europe but the entire world. She arrived during the first great wave of migration, between 1994 and 2004, mostly from outside Europe. The second wave, from 2004, would be indelibly linked to Europe. It was around this time, in 2005, that Badenoch joined the Tories.

“My personal experience has shaped me as a politician, because I grew up somewhere that was very different, and I left just as childhood was coming to an end, becoming an adult when I came here,” Badenoch tells me in an interview earlier this week. “I am very much shaped by what I saw growing up in Nigeria and by my experiences in those formative years, 16 to 21, and the profound observation that I have is that people in the UK take so much for granted and assume that, because things have been good, they’re always going to be good.”

Her politics, in other words, are founded on a sense of fragility born in Africa that she feels is too often missing in the minds of comfortable Europeans. Another instinct from her experience growing up outside the progressive West is a deep scepticism about the emphasis on racism and imperial guilt — and the lack of focus on what she sees as gentle English orderliness and meritocracy.

“When people say that the police treat you differently because of the colour of your skin and so on, I’m sure that there will be cases where that has happened, but I grew up in a place where the police looked exactly like me and they were not nice.” The contrast with Nigerian policing, not the racism, is what struck Badenoch the most about British policing, and with it the fear that what is good about British policing could be lost. “The concept of policing by consent is so special. The concept of being innocent until you’re proven guilty is actually very rare. We are losing this.” This is the instinct at the core of conservatism, which is concerned less by perfecting what exists than conserving what might be lost. The same is true of her politics more broadly.

When Badenoch looks at Britain, she does not see a cesspit of racism, inequality and backwardness — a benighted Brexit Isle cut off from the world — but a place with relatively mild faults that needs protecting, perhaps even from itself, before it loses what it has.

Badenoch’s muses provide further evidence of her unique post-colonial conservatism. In recent weeks, I have asked various Conservative MPs and leadership contenders to name their intellectual inspirations, and I’ve been struck by how quickly they have reached back to Margaret Thatcher and her milieu as if lost for contemporary ideas. Badenoch, by contrast, offers four influences, all of whom are concerned with loss. At least three of them are notable for their prominence in today’s America rather than Britain: Thomas Sowell, the voice of black conservatism in the United States; Jonathan Haidt, the American social psychologist; and Why Nations Fail by the Nobel prize-winning economists Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson. Her fourth muse is the English conservative Roger Scruton.

Her analysis of modern Britain is a combination of these influences. The thesis of Why Nations Fail, in Badenoch’s telling, is that the countries that succeed are built on trust — a trust that is being broken in Britain, as both Scruton and Bedenoch would have it, because the political class has, for too long failed to stand up for the nation and to affirm what its members see as their inherited rights.

She offers two examples of why trust in Britain is breaking down, both of which are distinctly modern and distinctly conservative. First: immigration; second: social media. “If you bring people to a country en masse with very different attitudes, and you don’t have a muscular emphasis on what is special about this country, what is different, why that’s important, it will erode,” she tells me. “You can’t just take it for granted. You can’t just assume that everybody understands these things.”

Badenoch is the immigrant who believes she can see more clearly than the home-born English the real dangers of immigration. This is not, in her view, racism in a multiracial Britain, but the loss of a unifying sense of nation. When it comes to diagnosing Britain’s problems, the fact that she is an immigrant can be an advantage. “It means that I am very, very crystal clear on what things can look like if they go wrong,” she tells me.

The language she uses to speak about nationalism is more strident than any other politician I have interviewed. When I ask her if she agrees with Scruton that the disquiet over immigration, as he put it, was the result not of racism, but “the disruption of an old experience of home”, she says she agrees “very much so — and I can say that because I also know how people react in other countries when things don’t look familiar”. She argues in this regard that nostalgia is not simply a negative emotion, but provides an “anchor on what used to be helps people stay rooted in a community”.

This runs into a central theme of her leadership pitch: the duty of patriotism. “Citizenship is not about having a passport,” she tells me. “Citizenship, to me, means being rooted in a place, wanting it to succeed. It’s not about what you look like… you don’t just want yourself to succeed. You want your neighbourhood to do well. You want your neighbours to do well. You want the success of your country for the next generation, and you’re not obsessed about what’s happening thousands of miles away, either out of, you know, prurient interest, or because of some ancestral history that you might have.”

She is dismissive of citizenship tests, believing instead that patriotism must be promoted organically by everyone in society. Above all, it has to be felt. “[Britain] is not a dormitory. It is not a hotel, for people who are just passing by who want to make some money — and yes, there is a place for that, but we should want people who want the success of the UK.” For a Tory free marketeer, it is striking that she feels able to attack the global super-rich for using Britain as a “hotel” just as much as she attacks some of the poorer arrivals who she claims see the country as a dormitory.

She goes as far as to say she is “horrified” by the videos on TikTok of people saying they wouldn’t fight for the country, believing it’s “cool” to say they’re not from Britain. “All this nonsense we get every St George’s Day of, oh, well, St George wasn’t English. He was Turkish and so on. And there’s no such thing as English culture. This is nonsense, trying to pretend that culture is always something that comes from elsewhere, and what we have here is not real. I think that these are actually very destructive ideas that undermine a lot of the fabric of society that binds people together. And I’m not afraid to say that.”

That she is not afraid to say things is a core part of both Badenoch’s appeal — and her unpopularity. To some, she is crass, reactionary and even rude — all of which was said of Thatcher. She is certainly strident. Badenoch tells me she backed Brexit in part because of Angela Merkel’s decision to open Germany’s borders to help cope with the flow of migration in the early 2010s — “a fundamental violation of my view of citizenship”, as she puts it. “She created… lots of EU citizens without anybody else’s consent. I thought that was wrong.”

Speaking to some of her critics within the Tory party, there are hints — usually whispered — that Badenoch’s immigrant background does not mean she has a deeper understanding of England, but a shallower one ultimately influenced by the usual American obsessions. In this, her love of Sowell and Haidt is just a mirror of the Left’s obsession with critical race theory and decolonisation. We are all just poor reflections of an American political divide. Perhaps, but there is more than a whiff of xenophobia in such analysis. If Badenoch is not British enough for some, it is hard to see how any immigrant could ever be.

As Badenoch herself puts it, her background confers both advantages and disadvantages. It allows her, for example, to voice an opinion that I think is the closest to Enoch Powell’s analysis of the Commonwealth that I have heard, criticising the preferential treatment given to those migrants from former colonies compared to European citizens. Powell was the original Commonwealth sceptic in British politics, dismissing it as a charade to pretend Britain still had an empire. There will be some deep ironies at play if it falls to an immigrant — who Powell would not have welcomed — to finally sever the final connections with the Commonwealth based on a similar instinct.

“There is a whole new set of issues that our generation has to deal with,” Badenoch tells me. For her, these are migration, the rise of the authoritarian powers “hacking industrialisation”, the progressives “hacking” liberalism, all aided and the rise of social media. “Knowing who we can trust now is getting harder and harder, not just because we are becoming more diverse and that creates, you know, some complexity, but also because of social media and the removal of supposedly trusted voices who everyone would listen to and say, well, yes, they are the authorities, and if they said it, it must be true — now everyone has equivalence.”

For Badenoch, of course, there is no equivalence in life — that is the point. Not everyone’s opinions are equally valid, just as not every culture is equally valid. And as she says, she is not afraid to say it — a phrase I suspect we are going to grow tired of hearing. Badenoch has opinions on everything and we will hear them.

To protect Britain from the forces of modernity, Badenoch suggests what she calls “muscular liberalism” both at home and abroad. This is the Badenoch promise: unrepentant and even, at times, abrasive conservative-liberalism. Call it Badenochism — an immigrant’s vision of Roger Scruton’s England.