I love being a culture warrior, says Conservative leader Badenoch

Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch has welcomed being labelled a “culture warrior”.

In a speech in Washington DC, she said being criticised for this by “the left-wing media” was meant to be an insult, “but I love the title”.

Her grandfather told her she was descended from warriors, so she was “keeping up the tradition”, she quipped.

The term “culture war” is generally used in a negative way to describe a political battle between opposing values, often focused on social issues such as gender politics.

Badenoch met Speaker of the US House of Representatives Mike Johnson in DC as she seeks to build links with senior Republicans ahead of Donald Trump’s return to the White House next month.

In a post on X, she said they discussed building alliances in “a centre-right resurgence” across the West.

The Tory leader is not expected to meet President-elect Trump during her visit.

Badenoch has previously resisted the “culture warrior” tag, insisting during her successful leadership campaign she did not like fighting – but was prepared to fight to defend Conservative principles.

Her “culture warrior” comments came in a speech at a dinner hosted by the International Democracy Union, a global alliance of centre-right parties.

She said she believed in tradition, adding “if we don’t defend our culture, who will?”

She said she also believed in freedom – free markets, free speech, free enterprise, freedom of religion, “trusted institutions within the rule of law, and equality under the law, no matter who you are or where you come from”.

But liberalism had “been hacked”, socially and economically, by politicians on the left, Badenoch argued.

“I worry that we are losing what made our countries great,” she said.

Badenoch, who became Conservative leader last month, said “opposing ideologies” were taking over and undermining the culture and institutions that had created space for them.

She accused the left of using “oppression narratives” while being “not that interested in ethnic minorities except as a tool to fight their battles against the right”.

Anti-racist groups, she said, were deciding that all white people were racist and campaigning against “white privilege”.

The environmental movement, she added, had been taken over by a “radical green absolutism” about net zero.

Feminism, she complained, “doesn’t know what a woman is any more”.

She called for conservatives to fight back, by standing up for a “muscular liberalism” and curbing “the growth of activist government”.

Badenoch’s robust, “anti-woke” views and no-nonsense style have made her popular with Conservative activists.

She has described left-wing students at Sussex University, where she gained degrees in computer systems and engineering, as the “spoiled, entitled, privileged metropolitan elite-in-training”.

As a junior equalities minister under Boris Johnson, she challenged the notion there was widespread institutional racism in Britain, saying she had experienced prejudice only from left-wingers.

She calls herself a gender-critical feminist, and has been an outspoken opponent of moves to allow self-certification of transgender identity, spearheading the previous government’s blocking of Scotland’s Gender Recognition Reform Bill.

She has also opposed gender-neutral toilets.

At this year’s Tory conference in Birmingham, she made headlines with a claim that not all cultures were “equally valid”.

Nor has she shied away from clashes with MPs on her own side – including when she rejected calls to make it illegal to discriminate against people going through the menopause.

Appearing before a Commons committee, she told chair Caroline Nokes “loads of people” wanted to use equalities law as “a tool for different personal agendas and interests”.