Can Kemi checkmate her rivals for the Tory crown?

As she bids to succeed Rishi Sunak, biographer Lord Ashcroft reveals how the junior chess champion's early life in Lagos shaped her

- Lord Ashcroft

NIGERIA has long been regarded as a risky place to visit, but it would probably be difficult for many Britons to grasp just how volatile it could be when Kemi Badenoch, née Adegoke, was raised there during the final quarter of the 20th century - a politically explosive era resulting in three decades of military juntas.

After its 1970s oil boom began to peter out, almost nobody was immune to the widespread disruption that followed.

"Tipping' the police in order to go about one's daily business was considered normal and 'jungle justice' when, for example, someone caught stealing risked being doused in petrol and set on fire by a mob was not uncommon.

In one sense, growing up under a series of military regimes was second nature to Badenoch and her two younger siblings.

They knew nothing other than the instability which most Nigerians endured. At the same time, her middle-class Christian family was relatively lucky because they were largely insulated from the disorder.

Her father Femi was a GP with his own clinic, her mother Feyi was an academic at the University of Lagos's College of Medicine.

The 44-year-old, who married banker Hamish Badenoch in 2012 and has three children, has said that her family was close.

Unlike the parents of some of her friends, hers remained married, providing a solid platform on which she was able to build.

They were fairly relaxed by Nigerian standards, apparently becoming known jovially as the Cosbys, after the 1980s American television comedy The Cosby Show, whose main character was a doctor in New York.

In the early 1990s, she enrolled at the co-educational International School Lagos (ISL). Taiwo Togun was one of the first friends she made there. She says Badenoch was not a rebel but she could be outspoken.