“Anti-woke” candidate Kemi Badenoch on Saturday, November 2, won the vote to become the UK Conservatives’ new leader, replacing Rishi Sunak who quit after the party’s disastrous showing in July’s general election.
Badenoch, 44, came out on top in the two-horse race with former immigration minister Robert Jenrick, winning 57% of the votes of party members.
She said that becoming party leader was an “enormous honour,” but that “the task that stands before us is tough.” “We have to be honest about the fact we made mistakes” and “let standards slip,” she said. “It is time to get down to business, it is time to renew,” she added.
The combative former equalities minister now faces the daunting task of reuniting a divided and weakened party that was emphatically ousted from power in July after 14 years in charge.
Badenoch will become the official leader of the opposition and face off against Labour’s Keir Starmer in the House of Commons every Wednesday for the traditional Prime Minister’s Questions. However, she will be leading a much-reduced cohort of Tory MPs in the chamber following the party’s dismal election showing.
She must plot a strategy to regain public trust while stemming the flow of support to the right-wing Reform UK party, led by Brexit figurehead Nigel Farage. Having campaigned on a right-wing platform, she also faces the prospect of future difficulties within the ranks of Tory lawmakers, which includes many centrists.
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Badenoch, born in London to Nigerian parents and raised in Lagos, has called for a return to conservative values, accusing her party of having become increasingly liberal on societal issues such as gender identity. She describes herself as a straight-talker, a trait that has caused controversy on the campaign trail.
When addressing immigration, Badenoch said that “not all cultures are equally valid” when deciding who should be allowed to live in the UK. She was widely criticised after suggesting that statutory maternity pay on small businesses was “excessive” and sparked further furore when she joked that up to 10% of Britain’s half a million civil servants were so bad that they “should be in prison.”
