Kemi Badenoch speaking to the BBC at conference

POLITICS is a world peppered with personal twists of fate, a trail of could’ve beens, almost and maybes.

The events of April 25, 2017 certainly were for Kemi Badenoch, now one of the four remaining candidates to be the next leader of Conservative Party.

Then a member of the London Assembly, she had put herself forward to be the Tories’ parliamentary candidate in what was Hampstead and Kilburn, relishing the idea of taking on Tulip Siddiq MP.

But at a primary in the Hampstead Synagogue in Dennington Park Road, both she and Henry Newman, a former aide to Michael Gove, were overlooked by members who instead opted for council group leader Claire-Louise Leyland. It was a rare occasion where losing probably amounts to winning, maybe she had a lucky escape.

Ms Badenoch dusted herself down and swiftly claimed the candidature in Saffron Waldon.

Here she had a healthy  Tory majority to rely on, a huge contrast to what she would have faced in the north of Camden had she been selected here.

Almost certainly, however energetic her campaign might have been, she would have lost and the brakes of defeat would have slowed down her climb through the Conservative ranks.

Fast forward to now and she is running to become the leader of the Conservative Party and Sir Keir Starmer’s rival for Downing Street at the next general election.

To do that she will have to win a contest against three men: Robert Jenrick, James Cleverly and Tom Tugendhat.

While all four campaigns had lively stands at the conference and teams of supporters drumming up encouragement, Ms Badenoch is perhaps the most outspoken – a style which is celebrated as punchy by her supporters and crashingly insensitive by those who want someone else.

There was a backlash this week when she started the conference by appearing to say maternity pay should be reined in and that “not all cultures are equally valid” in the UK.

Later, she told the BBC: “I would knock on doors and you would see somebody at the door who says: ‘I can’t speak to you, I will get my husband.’ “I don’t think that is as equally valid as our culture.”

Isabel Loubser and Daisy Clague from the CNJ collecting opinions in Birmingham

Most members were being coy about who they were supporting this week.

But Oliver Cooper, a former leader of the Conservatives in Camden and now a councillor in Hertfordshire, said that Ms Badenoch was his first choice to succeed the outgoing Rishi Sunak.

“She is a straight-talker” he said. “She says it like she sees it.”

Asked if this could be seen as divisive, he said: “As Margaret Thatcher said ‘if they’re never going to vote for you, it doesn’t matter how much they are going to hate you’. Ultimately, the message that we are going to put out needs to be strong, consistent and clear. There are going to be some people who disagree but we saw again with Margaret Thatcher’s two landslide wins and another election win, you can still win without 100 per cent of the people liking you.”

Mr Cooper added: “She was talking about the fact that if you have a society where you have widespread slavery, for example like in the case of Mauritania even today, that is not an equally valid social choice to the one we’ve made as a free society.

“If you have a society where women do not have full and equal rights, that is not an equally valid choice as we’ve made. She’s been really clear about that and I’m really proud that she was.”

The power to decide who gets through to the final two and a run-off for the leadership lies with MPs whose votes will be counted up next week.

The party membership then get a ballot, which closes on Halloween. A new leader is due to be announced on November 2.