Badenoch wants personal apology from David Tennant in trans row

Kemi Badenoch said she thought the actor was 'probably regretting making those remarks' - Wiktor Szymanowicz/Anadolu

Kemi Badenoch has said she wants a personal apology from David Tennant after the actor told her to “shut up” and said he wished she “did not exist any more” because of her views on women’s rights.

After the Doctor Who star’s comments at an LGBT awards ceremony in London, Mrs Badenoch, the equalities minister, said she would not be silenced by a “rich, lefty, white male celebrity”.

Asked on Sunday whether she thought Tennant should personally apologise, she told GB News: “I think he should. I think he’s probably regretting making those remarks given the uproar all across the country. It’s had a lot of cut-through, but it also shows the scale of the problem we have.”

Tennant played the Tenth Doctor in the BBC series from 2005 to 2010, returning last year to play the Fourteenth Doctor.

Last week, Sylvester McCoy, who played the Seventh Doctor from 1987 to 1989, wrote on X, formerly Twitter: “Bravo David. Don’t let the Badenochs get you down”.

Mrs Badenoch said Sir Keir Starmer, the Labour leader, had refused to condemn Dawn Butler, a Labour candidate who tweeted that she agreed with the actor.

“I keep telling people that it’s not just Keir Starmer that you’re going to get when you get Labour, you’re going to have all these MPs with very, very bad politics, really dangerous stuff, wishing another MP doesn’t exist,” she said.

“And if you remember how they reacted when there were comments which emerged several years later that have been made in private about Diane Abbott [by Frank Hester, a Tory donor], we didn’t stop hearing about it for well over a week.

“So it’s one rule for them and another rule for everyone else. They don’t really care about racism, they just care about their own people.”

Mrs Badenoch again did not rule out standing to be Tory leader after the election, saying that future the party “needs to be one that occupies the whole of the centre-Right, not just the centre, because that’s where we’re losing to Reform”.

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