Kemi Badenoch decided she wanted to be leader of the Conservative party after her father died and she became less risk averse.
The shadow Housing secretary revealed for the first time how she decided as a lowly local government minister to ran for the Tory leadership against more experienced politicians two years ago.
Badenoch surprised Westminster by beating more experienced Cabinet ministers and making it to the fourth round of six voting rounds by MPs before being eliminated in July 2022.
Two years later she is now one of the favourites to succeed Rishi Sunak as Conservative leader.
Kemi Badenoch became emotional as she spoke on Chopper's Political Podcast about the death of her dad
GB NEWS
In emotional exchanges on Chopper's Political Podcast, Badenoch said: "My Dad died right at the beginning of 2022. And to me, that was the worst possible thing that could happen in my life.
"My Dad is one of my heroes. Still is even though he's no longer around. And I often found that when I was telling stories and anecdotes, it would be ‘my Dad showed me how to do this’, and ‘my Dad taught me that’, and ‘my Dad said this’ and so on, and it felt like the foundation had been pulled away from under me.
"But it also meant that I became less risk averse. In January 2022, just before he died, [if] someone had said 'you're going to be running for leader in six months time', I would have said 'that's completely crazy, why would I want to do that? We have a great prime minister in Boris, why would anyone want to do that?'
"And then when all of this stuff happened that led to Boris leaving, I looked at the people who were going forwards, and two of them had actually been my secretaries of state, Liz and Rishi.
Badenoch surprised Westminster by beating more experienced Cabinet ministers in the 2022 race
GB NEWS
"And I'd worked with them very closely. And I thought 'I don't think that either of this will work'. What I'll do is I will run and then I'm not going to do well, but then people will want me on their team, and that way I'll be able to help shape things.
"So then it wasn't really about becoming prime minister, it was about being listened to."
The difference between this year's leadership campaign and the race in 2022 was that "now I think, yes, maybe I can win this time. So this time I will present my offer. This broken system needs an engineer to fix it. I'm an engineer."
Listen to Christopher Hope's interview with Kemi Badenoch on Chopper's Political Podcast on Spotify or Apple Podcasts, or watch it on GBNews.com
