Kemi Badenoch, Wall Street con men and the Mother of Dragons

Kemi Badenoch, leader of the Conservative Party, has sat down for an interview with the Spectator, her former employer. Badenoch, well known for her esoteric remarks, told the interview team of Katy Balls and new editor Michael Gove that, among other things, “I won’t touch bread if it’s moist”, and remarkably “I don’t think sandwiches are real food”.

But in among it all, Badenoch came out with an even more eye-catching comment: “Lunch,” she said, “is for wimps”.

As fans of ’80s Hollywood will tell you, that line is from the Oliver Stone movie Wall Street, and is delivered by Gordon Gekko, the swaggering financier with the red braces and the huge corner office, played by Michael Douglas.

The only problem for Badenoch is that, er, Gekko turns out to be a fraudster who’ll trample on anyone to get what he wants, and who ends up in the slammer. The Gekko character was so monumentally foul that he came to embody the excessive self-interest of Reagan-era America.

Fictional he may have been, but Gekko was based on a real-life Wall St con man named Ivan Boesky, who was the originator of the famous “greed is good” line, which also appears in the film. Boesky also ended up in jail, on charges of insider trading.

Moving to a very different type of fictional character, Badenoch also revealed that she felt a strong association with Daenerys Targaryen, the “Mother of Dragons” character from the TV series Game of Thrones. At the end of the saga, (spoiler alert) Targaryen goes mad, gets on a huge fire-breathing dragon and incinerates everything in sight before being killed by the person who is closest to her. All of which might give her colleagues at CCHQ pause for thought.

Perhaps if Badenoch wants to run the country, she might start by finding some less hair-raising role models.