Chapter 1
In December 1979, a young husband and wife from Nigeria travelled thousands of miles into the depths of a London winter on a mission to ensure the baby they were expecting could be delivered in what they believed was the best environment money could buy. A few days after a consultation with a Harley Street doctor, they headed south to the suburb of Wimbledon. There, at St Teresa’s Maternity Hospital, they waited for the miracle of a new life to begin. At the time St Teresa’s, which was run by an order of Roman Catholic nuns called the Sisters of St Anne, was known as a private maternity clinic to the stars. During the 1970s, the children of the media tycoon Rupert Murdoch, the James Bond actor George Lazenby and the Rolling Stones guitarist Mick Taylor were among those born there. On Wednesday 2 January 1980, the name Olukemi Olufunto Adegoke was added to the clinic’s record of births. Neither the child’s mother, Feyi, nor her father, Femi, could have known it then, but their decision to make the trip to Britain would prove highly significant. For even though the infant was taken straight back home to Lagos to be brought up there, she had acquired a legal right to UK citizenship by virtue of having been born on British soil. Ultimately, this status cleared the path for her to return to London as a teenager in the 1990s, to make a life for herself in this country and, in 2017, to become an MP, which she did under her married name, Kemi Badenoch.
Between the 1960s and the 1980s, it was not unusual for Nigerian women – nor, indeed, those from a range of other countries who could afford the airfare and medical bills – to opt for treatment at the appealingly old-fashioned St Teresa’s. It had opened in 1938 as a private hospital for patients with advanced cancer and heart disease, but after the NHS was founded a decade later, it was converted into a small maternity unit. For the next nineteen years, just over half of its seventy or so beds were funded by an NHS contract. This model made it possible for the Sisters of St Anne and their lay colleagues to care for the marginalised in society, to whom they felt a duty, as well as better-off clients who could pay. When the clinic’s NHS funding was cancelled in 1967, the nuns were determined to carry on with their work. They did so via a mixture of private patients’ fees, donations, bequests and the efforts of volunteers, looking after the needs of as many women as they could, regardless of their financial position. St Teresa’s international reputation was well deserved. The standard of care there was so high that between 1948 and 1974, only one mother died in more than 28,000 deliveries. It made a point of not being a conveyer belt-style institution but a place where women were given individual attention and, if they wanted it, time to recuperate in relaxed surroundings after the rigours of childbirth. Badenoch’s parents liked the hospital so much they returned there in order that Feyi could give birth to their next child, a son, Folahan, in June 1982. Despite the best efforts of the nuns, however, funding dried up not long afterwards and the hospital was forced to close in 1986. It has since been demolished and a block of flats has been built on its former site.
Kemi Badenoch’s birth was formally registered by her mother in the London borough of Merton the day after she was born and it is through the information included on her birth certificate that it is possible to start piecing together her parents’ backgrounds and, by extension, some details of her own upbringing. The certificate lists two addresses for Feyi Adegoke. Her British address in January 1980 was given as Flat 31, Ayerst Court, Beaumont Road, Walthamstow, in the outer reaches of north-east London. In fact, this property was where her brother, Emerson Adubifa, and her sister-in-law, Elizabeth, lived. Two weeks after recording the birth with the British authoritie
