Kemi Badenoch has insisted she was offered a place to study medicine at Stanford University but said she does not now have the relevant papers.
The Conservative Party leader previously said that at the age of 16 she was offered a place and partial scholarship to study medicine, sometimes describing it as pre-med, at the highly competitive California university.
It comes after a new report cast doubt on the claim.
Offers are made only to applicants with a Bachelor’s degree, or an international equivalent, and there is no pre-med degree, according to the university’s website.
The Conservatives were asked for clarification and said Mrs Badenoch had not applied but was offered a place by multiple US universities, including Stanford, on the basis of good exam results in US standardised tests, the Guardian reported on Sunday.
A Stanford admissions officer at the time of her application told the Guardian that he had not offered Mrs Badenoch a place and would have remembered if he had done so.
Jon Reider, then responsible for admitting international students and the allocation of bursaries, told the newspaper: “Although 30 years have passed, I would definitely remember if we had admitted a Nigerian student with any financial aid. The answer is that we did not do so.
“I assure you that we would not have admitted a student based on test scores alone, nor would we have mailed an invitation to apply to any overseas students based on test scores.”
A Labour source said Mrs Badenoch needed to “come clean about what’s happened here and whether she’s been telling the truth to the British people”.
The source added: “Honesty and integrity aren’t optional qualities for those who serve as leader of His Majesty’s official opposition. The uncertainty surrounding Kemi Badenoch’s Stanford University claims raise important questions that the public deserve to know the answers to.”
On Monday evening, Labour MP Peter Prinsley wrote to Ms Badenoch, asking her to provide documentation to back up her university claims.
Mrs Badenoch, who moved to the UK from Nigeria aged 16, told the PA news agency on Monday: “All I will say is that I remember the very day those letters came to me, it was not just from Stanford, I was 16, I had done very well in my SATs.
“But this is 30 years ago, I don’t have the papers, and what the Guardian is doing is reporting on hearsay rather than talking about what the government is doing.
“I’m very happy to stand by what I said – when I was 16 I did get an offer, and I’ve explained what that was, and the Guardian can try and cast aspersions as much as they like, but they’d be better off looking at this government’s woeful record and the CVs of the people who are running the country now, which has been proven to be less than satisfactory.”
Her comments were made during a rainy visit to a house in Redhill for a discussion with Surrey residents on property taxes.
The Guardian also spoke to Ivy League admissions coaches, as well as an author specialising in college admissions, a number of Stanford graduates, and an Ivy League vice-provost.
Each person said they did not believe it was plausible for such an offer to be made proactively on exam results alone.
One senior US academic told the Guardian that he had never heard of any exemptions, even for internationally renowned child prodigies and royalty.
Mrs Badenoch first spoke of the Stanford offer to the Huffington Post in 2017, after being elected Conservative MP for Saffron Walden, according to the newspaper.
She told the US news outlet that at the age of 16 she wanted to be a doctor but “going to a very bad school here stopped me”.
“I had actually got admission into medical school in the US – I got into Stanford pre-med – and I got into medical school in Nigeria but I came here because being a citizen, it was just a lot cheaper.”
The Times newspaper interviewed Mrs Badenoch in 2024, and the piece said: “At 16, her US SAT scores won her a partial pre-med scholarship to Stanford, but her family still couldn’t afford the place.”
Mr Reider went on to tell the Guardian it was implausible that a student would be offered a partial scholarship they could not afford to take.
“There was no point in offering them less because they would not have been able to attend. If we admitted them, we wanted them to enrol”, he said.
The Spectator and the Daily Mail also reported the Stanford claims in profiles of Mrs Badenoch.
A spokesperson for the Conservative Party leader told the Guardian: “Nearly 30 years ago, and aged 16, Kemi was offered a part-scholarship at Stanford that her parents couldn’t afford to take up.
“But, given her subsequent degrees in both engineering and law are a matter of public record, she questions the hysterical efforts to disprove this, from people who showed little interest in probing Rachel Reeves’s hole-filled CV that has contributed to the economic crisis engulfing our country.”
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