Cringed so hard while reading this terrific @jessicaelgot.bsky.social story I think I ruptured something. Who at GMG do I need to sue?
Replies
Once upon a time, long before Boris Johnson, I believe the Conservatives used to have at least a veneer about about personal responsibility & taking ownership of your own failures & mistakes. 🤷♂️
sep 1, 2025, 7:49 am • 1 0 • view
She mentions this once in an interview years ago and it’s recycled as fact by various Tory toadies until nobody checks to see if there is even a grain of truth in it … until now. Busted. Bad Enoch is a fake. Just another liar who has reached the top of a dying party.
sep 1, 2025, 10:58 am • 1 0 • view
Genuine question: has there ever been a worse leader of one of the three historic major parties in the UK. Not necessarily electorally, politically, or in terms of damaging the country, but the fundamentals of doing the job of party leader.
aug 31, 2025, 9:29 pm • 5 0 • view
Really good question. The contenders to her crown are Asquith and Lloyd George, and that I think you need *both* to achieve what she has done alone tells its own story.
aug 31, 2025, 11:41 pm • 3 0 • view
For me, it's the sheer irrelevance of the Tory party right now. I never thought I'd see either Labour or the Tories achieve that, especially not this quickly, but as someone on the left of Labour (or beyond its left in the current iteration) I thought I'd enjoy it more than this...
sep 1, 2025, 12:44 am • 3 0 • view
When Jenrick gives her the boot they'll be relevant again, but in a bad way. That's why Reform are polling so high, because the Tories are so crap.
sep 1, 2025, 1:40 am • 1 0 • view
The rest is history are absolutely fantastic on their insights into Asquith, especially in their current series on WW1 and how unserious he was being in the lead up to and the first half of it
sep 1, 2025, 9:39 am • 1 0 • view
surely Truss is in with a shout? Even though she perhaps got madder as a person after being booted (I'm struggling to remember how mad she came across during her month in office)
sep 1, 2025, 7:57 am • 1 0 • view
Johnson.
aug 31, 2025, 9:39 pm • 0 0 • view
Corbyn ?
aug 31, 2025, 10:03 pm • 0 0 • view
Jeremy Corbyn ate my hamster.
aug 31, 2025, 10:36 pm • 1 0 • view
And that was just for starters
aug 31, 2025, 10:53 pm • 1 0 • view
You're supposed to be irritated by my wit, not be witty in return. That's not fair. 😭
aug 31, 2025, 11:07 pm • 1 0 • view
No, obviously not close, because Labour did not flirt with *extinction* while he was leader and were able to form a government after him. The first is definitely not true of Badenoch, and the second may well also be false.
aug 31, 2025, 11:37 pm • 6 0 • view
Are all of the Tory Party's ills blameable on Badenoch though? She didn't come too long after Truss and Johnson, who set things on a downward slope. Much though politically I'd be politically closer to Corbyn, I think he out-craps her...
sep 1, 2025, 12:17 am • 2 0 • view
Badenoch took over a party polling 28 per cent that was flirting with first place.
sep 1, 2025, 8:00 am • 0 0 • view
Would the subsequent nosedive have happened anyway though? Unfortunately I think the only thing that will boost their ratings, at least in the short term, is some Jenrick like character, given that we live in polarised times.
sep 1, 2025, 10:26 am • 0 0 • view
In hindsight there was no extinction event, but after 2019 that wasn't so obvious - the Starmer turn around and Johnsons failings were still unknown. She is clearly flirting with extinction - but that hasn't happened (yet), and we don't know who will replace her (bench don't look too good though).
sep 1, 2025, 12:51 am • 0 0 • view
Not in hindsight - in 2019 there were 200 Labour MPs, there was not a viable alternative party. The 2025 local elections are a calamity for a major party of a kind not seen in this country since the 1920s.
sep 1, 2025, 8:01 am • 2 0 • view
Also Corbyn becoming leader was a weird factional trick shot. But Badenoch was hyped as one to watch before being being elected, was fast tracked into ministeral ranks & entered the leadership election as favourite. Her being so bad raises so many questions about her motivation & party culture
sep 1, 2025, 8:52 am • 10 0 • view
it's such a weird lie to tell as well
aug 31, 2025, 9:27 pm • 3 0 • view
Indeed - absolutely no value in making the claim at all.
aug 31, 2025, 11:39 pm • 1 0 • view
Oh god this so reminds me of something someone I knew at uni once similarly claimed, which because I knew it to be clearly false has never left me even though I could not even tell you her name or anything else about her. Somehow nothing worse than being exposed for this, for some reason.
aug 31, 2025, 10:57 pm • 1 0 • view
I think it scarred me to the point where I actually cannot bring up genuine successes I've had in case I have accidentally imagined them!
aug 31, 2025, 10:57 pm • 0 0 • view
I do want to circle back to the guy who would definitely remember if they’d offered a place to someone in Nigeria 30 years ago though. I mean it might be true but er
aug 31, 2025, 9:26 pm • 1 0 • view
I guess if you only did like 4 scholarships to 16 year olds across your career, you'd probably remember them all.
aug 31, 2025, 9:27 pm • 6 0 • view
Yeah fair
aug 31, 2025, 9:29 pm • 1 0 • view
He also says there were never any offered to Nigerians so it’s plausible he’d expect to remember the one time a scholarship from a given country
aug 31, 2025, 9:55 pm • 4 0 • view
I seem to have skipped several words there, but you get the gist
aug 31, 2025, 9:58 pm • 1 0 • view
Maybe somebody (a parent?) told her this happened to make her feel better about flunking out when she moved to the UK
aug 31, 2025, 8:52 pm • 0 0 • view
There's something rather tragic about this. In a Liz Truss kind of way. She, like Truss, should go away, have a lie down, think of something better to do with her life. And absolutely not write a book about it.
aug 31, 2025, 10:27 pm • 1 0 • view
Perhaps there's a stellar former pre-med scholarship winner who can help you with that...oh...
aug 31, 2025, 8:15 pm • 10 0 • view
Surely the state needs to step in a provide a bit of self-respect for this guy.
aug 31, 2025, 11:54 pm • 4 0 • view
Not even Kemi Badenoch is mad enough to take this bait “OK, fine they didn’t offer 16 yr old me a pre-med scholarship but Stanford did offer 16-year old me a biochem scholarship, in spite of the subsequent dearth of evidence that I have either the academic chops or the work ethic for such a thing”
aug 31, 2025, 9:29 pm • 10 0 • view
I'm actually going to take a guess that the tale started with Stanford potentially inviting her for an open day or similar (iirc her mum was a professor of biochem or similar who'd worked in the US, so that is possible) and that growing in the telling
aug 31, 2025, 9:37 pm • 4 0 • view
As ever, she might be better off thinking before speaking. Not that I believe her to be a particularly deep thinker.
aug 31, 2025, 9:39 pm • 3 0 • view
This business of her alleged offer makes her sound like Dougie Howser MD
sep 1, 2025, 12:19 am • 0 0 • view
Kemi Badinmaths?
aug 31, 2025, 8:48 pm • 3 0 • view
To me the most interesting is the blaming of others for her less than stellar A level results when she presumably would preach taking personal responsibility
aug 31, 2025, 8:24 pm • 34 0 • view
It plays into the long-standing Conservative idea that UK schools and teachers are both useless and indoctrination centres.
sep 1, 2025, 9:46 am • 2 0 • view
I don't get why she would lie about this? What does she think it'll achieve? who has ever, when deciding who to vote for, said "i don't agree with their politics but they got a scholarship so i guess i'll vote for them"
aug 31, 2025, 8:29 pm • 13 0 • view
I do wonder if she is trying to paint herself as exceptional but held back by the system. She's clearly full of shit, you see that whenever she is confronted with anything that she either has to explain or justify.
aug 31, 2025, 8:39 pm • 11 0 • view
I think Michael G0ve told her she as a genius (!).That's where the rot started.
aug 31, 2025, 10:29 pm • 1 0 • view
Fascists lie about everything, big and small, as a matter of course.
aug 31, 2025, 9:14 pm • 1 0 • view
I don’t know what’s more unbelievable, her blaming her teachers for flunking her A levels instead of herself, or her the other day saying Jenrick had told her that the leadership speculation around him was a burden he didn’t want to carry. If she genuinely believes that I’ve got many bridges on sale
aug 31, 2025, 9:19 pm • 0 0 • view
I know the Stanford admissions process very well from my time as a regional alumni co-chair, and I can tell you that Jon Reider's statements are as irrefutable as they come. If he says that the admission offer didn't happen, then it didn't happen. Great reporting here
aug 31, 2025, 8:22 pm • 71 9 • view
"Reider also revealed it was implausible for a student to be offered a partial scholarship they could not afford to take up." is the dagger imo b/c (at the time) Stanford admissions for international students were not need-blind, meaning that financial aid was taken into account. This is why /1
aug 31, 2025, 8:32 pm • 17 0 • view
he is so certain that he would remember a 16-year old international student who needed financial assistance. It also explains why Stanford was not in the business of engaging prospective international students proactively— no matter how well they performed on standardized tests. /end
aug 31, 2025, 8:32 pm • 20 1 • view
I wonder what she is basing the claim on then. Could she have got a letter from Stanford’s equivalent of CTY/TIP at that time and misunderstood it as undergrad admissions? Or did she radically misunderstand a Questbridge letter?
aug 31, 2025, 9:43 pm • 2 0 • view
I don't see a charitable/benign explanation to the totally of her statements. While Stanford currently offers a summer session program that is open to high school students, I can't confirm that it was active during the relevant time period; and to my knowledge it has never offered any financial aid
aug 31, 2025, 11:59 pm • 7 0 • view
Moreover the summer program for high schoolers has never had any sort of career-specific track— and certainly not a "pre-med" focus. As far as I can recall it has always been a glorified summer school for families willing to pay top dollar for 5-8 units to make their kids seem more competitive
sep 1, 2025, 12:05 am • 4 0 • view
She is a politician why are you looking for a plausible explanation? Occam’s Razor applies here. 99% of Politicians pad their CVs.
sep 1, 2025, 6:28 am • 0 0 • view
The most notable thing she has ever done was guessing Harriet Harman's password and vandalising her website.
aug 31, 2025, 8:14 pm • 16 0 • view
The cringe is on a par with her claiming that working at McDonalds as a teenage Saturday job makes her poor and working class.
aug 31, 2025, 10:09 pm • 6 0 • view
That teacher telling her, correctly, that she wasn't good enough to do medicine is something she never has or will get over. Probably doesn't help that she's boiling her brain in the social media badlands where 'low IQ' is used abusively for intellectual (and often racial) inferiority.
aug 31, 2025, 8:30 pm • 6 0 • view
Well at least she has a grade A in 'Fantasist' which is mandatory for Conservative leaders since, I think, John Major.
aug 31, 2025, 9:20 pm • 4 0 • view
Ah..
aug 31, 2025, 9:56 pm • 0 0 • view
Her hatred of cheats and rule breakers eh? Also remembering the Harriet Harman hack she got away with.
aug 31, 2025, 9:36 pm • 3 1 • view
"and I got into medical school in Nigeria but I came here because being a citizen, it was just a lot cheaper.” Isn't this what the Right vilify and accuse small boat refugees of trying to do, trying to gain citizenship to get stuff on the cheap?
aug 31, 2025, 9:40 pm • 7 1 • view
I’d have thought there would be a record of an offer of place. If there isn’t…..
sep 1, 2025, 8:04 am • 1 0 • view
It would be nice if the tabloids ran with this one. A few days of “Kemi’s Uni Porkies” would liven the Tories up a bit.
aug 31, 2025, 11:27 pm • 1 0 • view
You can see why Stanford were desperate to offer a scholarship to a 16 year old who went on to get B, B, D… Journalists can have a lot of fun by asking her to prove this claim in every interview
sep 1, 2025, 8:54 pm • 1 0 • view
And she claimed she deliberately hit lower FFS
sep 1, 2025, 8:58 pm • 2 0 • view
Not sure what you mean Stephen, she was just made an offer they deny making, for achieving grades she hadn't yet, to study a course they don't teach. All perfectly legitimate.
aug 31, 2025, 8:30 pm • 53 0 • view
In her addled mind, yes, all perfectly legitimate.
aug 31, 2025, 9:34 pm • 1 0 • view
yeah but how many houses does she have?
aug 31, 2025, 8:42 pm • 1 0 • view
not the house of commons eyy ohh
aug 31, 2025, 8:52 pm • 1 0 • view
All we need is Betsygate to complete the defenestration by traditional Tory techniques.
aug 31, 2025, 8:34 pm • 0 0 • view
You could sue Kemi. Though which version of her?
aug 31, 2025, 8:55 pm • 1 0 • view
This feels like the most Kemi thing so far.
aug 31, 2025, 9:17 pm • 0 0 • view
What gets me is there is literally no logic to her doing any of this. Even the most try-hard Voter Respecter couldn't come up with “well you metrolibs won’t get it but they'll love this in the Red Wall” angle to it. It's not even a result of her frying her brain with doomscrolling on twitter
aug 31, 2025, 9:43 pm • 1 0 • view
She reminds of Kyrsten Sinema as they are both people whose actions just make zero sense, even from a purely cynical POV
aug 31, 2025, 9:44 pm • 0 0 • view
But surely the point is that IF Stanford had this kind of course and bursary to offer (which, OK, they didn’t) then they would have offered it to Kemi, or, at the very least, they should have done. Maybe.
aug 31, 2025, 8:22 pm • 5 0 • view
what on earth is wrong with her? shes 45 ffs. i sometimes think that i should have been a bit more ambitious about where i went to uni (Newcastle) as i had the equivalent of 5 As but i at least got the grades to back it up, but also it was over 15 years ago so who cares
sep 1, 2025, 6:51 am • 2 0 • view
The Times, Spectator and Daily Mail all parroting the story without bothering with such journalistic details as fact checking.
aug 31, 2025, 9:23 pm • 2 0 • view
I may be wrong, but my instinct is she was pedalling this long before she brought it up in the 2017 interview. Sometimes lies become so intertwined into your personal narrative that you start to believe them yourself, or at least, you start to believe that they are unassailable. Erm, so I'm told.
aug 31, 2025, 9:23 pm • 5 0 • view
Well - goodness me. A Tory Party leader lied? Ridiculous. That is even less likely than The Daily Mail promoting fascism.
aug 31, 2025, 9:27 pm • 0 0 • view
Surely she wouldn't lie 🤥
aug 31, 2025, 9:35 pm • 0 0 • view
😬 Someone needs to dig out these SAT scores (if there are any). Based on her other academic results she doesn't seem to be top-notch academically. Which is fine as almost everyone isn't. Just don't pretend you are.
aug 31, 2025, 9:36 pm • 0 0 • view
As an aside she didn't go to law school which suggests she wasn't stellar at law either (accepting it's very competitive and she may not have applied).
aug 31, 2025, 9:37 pm • 0 0 • view
Rehashing my earlier comment on this. bsky.app/profile/timo...
aug 31, 2025, 8:22 pm • 20 1 • view
I’ll rehash one of mine, replaying to someone who commented on Iain Duncan Smith, pretend alumnus of University of Perugia. bsky.app/profile/amho...
aug 31, 2025, 8:34 pm • 8 0 • view
Medicine’s loss, Tory party gain 😂
aug 31, 2025, 9:30 pm • 2 0 • view
I do like how the manage to fit "She got two B's and a D" fit into the final paragraph. Fantastic way of saying something without saying something.
aug 31, 2025, 8:15 pm • 49 0 • view
They're not even terrible results. It's the fact that having got them she still maintains she's a straight A student as if that is better measured for her uniquely some other way than looking at exam results.
sep 1, 2025, 7:16 am • 3 0 • view
Kneecap had "fuck badenoch" on screen at their gig on Friday and I realised it was the first I'd heard of her in ages.
aug 31, 2025, 9:41 pm • 0 0 • view
She must have had premedication before she came up with that prognostication. It's clearly premeditated.
aug 31, 2025, 8:42 pm • 2 0 • view
I was basically studying by myself when I had to give up a few years ago (health) & was on track for A* biology, A-A* chemistry and B sociology (essays not a strong point). College must have been really bad, or... I mean that's basically the least cringe bit
aug 31, 2025, 8:17 pm • 1 0 • view
College was not long lasting nor did it feature as a feed to major U.K. or Ivy League US universities. Link to 1999 Inspectorate report dera.ioe.ac.uk/id/eprint/32...
aug 31, 2025, 8:35 pm • 0 0 • view
With those A levels, it really sounds like those teachers did her a favour by discouraging her to apply for medicine
aug 31, 2025, 10:48 pm • 2 0 • view
I think this dramatically accelerates her end. I bet she compounds the lie by doubling down on it in a way which leaves her open to verification she fails, thus confirming her dishonesty. Jenrick wins before the 2026 local elections but shrugs off those losses by blaming the previous management.
aug 31, 2025, 8:21 pm • 5 0 • view
“A Conservative party source said it was a common colloquialism to refer to taking a science undergraduate as “pre-med”” This just isn’t true - you don’t get admitted for any specified undergrad course at Stanford or most US colleges So she’s really jumping off the cliff now
aug 31, 2025, 8:29 pm • 10 0 • view
I thought all US students were either pre-law or pre-med, but everything I know about US higher education I learned from National Lampoon's Animal House. Perhaps her too.
aug 31, 2025, 8:54 pm • 0 0 • view
Possibly she meant *Stamford* University? www.stamforduniversity.edu.bd/index.php/st...
aug 31, 2025, 8:38 pm • 8 0 • view
Ahhhhhahahahahaha Almost she was presumably offered the place as part of some kind of email scam since she thinks someone offered her a place she never applied for
aug 31, 2025, 8:50 pm • 1 0 • view
Also “Samford” in the US en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samford...
aug 31, 2025, 8:51 pm • 1 0 • view
It could have been Stamford College, Lincolnshire 🤷♂️😉
sep 1, 2025, 7:43 am • 0 0 • view
“Badenoch had not in fact applied directly to Stanford but had received a number of offers from US, UK and Nigerian universities – including Stanford – when she received good SAT results.” This is obviously epic level bullshit and I’m willing to bet she didn’t receive any offer from Stanford
aug 31, 2025, 8:31 pm • 2 0 • view
At best, she might have received a generic mailer inviting an application. Even at non-selective schools, you don't get an offer of admission if you don't apply. Much less a scholarship! And Stanford admits only 4% of its applicants.
aug 31, 2025, 9:56 pm • 0 0 • view
Plus the SAT is a generic standardized test. People score high all the time. That alone gets you nothing.
aug 31, 2025, 10:21 pm • 0 0 • view
Yes exactly the most competitive destinations (& Stanford was one of them since the 80s) require quite over the top applications eg did you win a sword fighting duel in your summer holidays and set up a charity in your final year of middle school
aug 31, 2025, 10:23 pm • 1 0 • view
Yeah I’ve got family stateside and from the moment I read that Times profile I thought “BS” because I knew you don’t apply for specific subjects at UG Also to be brutal, it’s extremely unlikely someone with her A levels would have pulled off the SATs to get into Stanford
aug 31, 2025, 10:20 pm • 1 0 • view
Yup. FWIW, the SAT plays a much smaller role in US university admissions than do A-levels in the UK. It is not a subject-area test. It does English vocabulary and simple math. I've done admissions work, and the SAT score may set a floor, because below a certain score you worry someone lacks
aug 31, 2025, 11:16 pm • 0 0 • view
the basic skills for college classes. But between scores in, say, the 90th and 99th percentiles, nobody cares. A few weeks of coaching can account for that difference.
aug 31, 2025, 11:16 pm • 0 0 • view
Maybe she was approved by Allen Stanford !
aug 31, 2025, 9:32 pm • 0 0 • view
Kemi: the “straight-A” cheat-snitch who sneers at victimhood. Reality? Bs, a D in maths — the very grade that shuts you out of engineering without a foundation year. Yet somehow this became a seamless four-year MEng fairy-tale. Funny how her own backstory needs the smoothing she scolds others for.
aug 31, 2025, 9:58 pm • 2 0 • view
She lives in cloud cuckoo land.
aug 31, 2025, 9:32 pm • 0 0 • view