‘No wonder you were so unpopular back at school. You sound really annoying.’
The Conservative Party leader Kemi Badenoch bragged about how she stood up in class during an exam and told on a student who she said was cheating.
The incident led to her classmate getting expelled from school.
In an interview with the BBC’s Amol Rajan, Badenoch said that at age 14 or 15, she told on a boy who she says she saw cheating in an exam due to her hatred of rule breakers.
Badenoch described herself as the “tattle-tale” in the class, and said she wasn’t “just a swot”, she would say “‘that person is copying notes from, you know, the other person’”.
She described a time where she stood up in an exam and said “‘he’s cheating, he’s the one that’s doing it’, and that boy ended up getting expelled”.
The Tory leader said: “I didn’t get praised for it. I was a relatively popular kid at school, and people said ‘why did you do that, why would you do it?’”.
She said she did it “because he was doing the wrong thing”.
Rajan looked visibly taken aback, and said: “Hang on a second. So you’re 14 years old, [14 or 15] in the middle of an exam, you see a boy cheating in the middle of an exam, in the middle of an exam hall. You stand up and you snitch on this kid who’s cheating, who ends up getting expelled?”.
He added: “No wonder you were so unpopular back at school. You sound really annoying.”
Badenoch was a student at the private International School of Lagos, in Nigeria and then went on to study her A-levels at a further education college in Morden, South London.
Olivia Barber is a reporter at Left Foot Forward
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