‘Move On’: Kemi Badenoch Defends Race Row Tory Donor, Blasts ‘Media Bubble’ Fixation
Business Secretary Kemi Badenoch spent Monday’s media rounds dismissing ongoing commentary around Tory donor Frank Hester’s “flippant” remarks about MP Diane Abbott as “trivia” and arguing that the party should keep his money because he has apologised, despite last week branding his remarks “racist.”
Hester’s 2019 remarks about Abbott resurfaced last week in a report by the Guardian, in which he said she made him “want to hate all black women” and should be “shot.”
At first Conservatives had refrained from calling the comments “racist”, instead saying they were “unacceptable” before Prime Minister Rishi Sunak condemned the remarks as “racist and wrong.”
Focus then grew on Hester’s status as the Conservative Party’s “biggest ever donor” and his company has received over £400m from the NHS and various government entities since 2016, including £135m worth of contracts from the Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC) in the past four years.
On Monday Badenoch conducted interviews with BBC Breakfast host Jon Kay, Sky News’ Kay Burley and LBC’s Nick Ferrari Monday and on each occasion was asked about Hester, whose comments she’d branded as “racist” when they were publicised.
The businessman made a £5m donation to the Conservatives in May 2023, followed by another £5m contributed by his company in November last year. With news that a further £5 million donation from Hester is in the pipelines, Badenoch blasted the news media’s coverage of the story as “pure media bubble speculation” and accused the BBC of being “not interested in the work that the government is doing.”
The minister told Burley: “I think it is fine for us to be able to accept and forgive and draw a line under it. Obviously, if something else happens in the future that might be something that we reconsider. In regards to donations to the party, people keep asking me, ‘do you think the money should be kept’? I have been very clear that, yes, I do think so.”
In her interview with the BBC, Badenoch said that the conversation needed to “move on” and that expressed her amazement at being asked about a story that was a week old. When host Kay pressed her on her criticism of Hester’s words as “racist” the minister said that this was her position one week ago but that “when people apologise we need to accept that and move on.”
Speaking to Ferrari, the minister went a step further, Badenoch said: “These comments were in no way reflective of the work that [Hester] has been doing, why we have taken his money. We need to get to a point where we stop chasing people around and looking everywhere for racism… We are ending up in a spiral where everybody is accusing and counter-accusing around racism. I think we need to move away from these things and actually focus on what matters to people.”
