Kemi Badenoch picked as new leader of UK’s Conservative Party
Britain’s Conservative Party on Saturday elected Kemi Badenoch as its new leader replacing former Prime Minister Rishi Sunak as it tries to rebound from a crushing election defeat that ended 14 years in power.
Kemi Badenoch has pledged to return it to its founding principles and win back voters after its worst election defeat in July.
Badenoch, 44, came out on top in the two-horse race with former Immigration Minister Robert Jenrick, winning 57 percent of the votes of party members.
Badenoch, a self-proclaimed enemy of wokeness suggesting that maternity pay in the U.K. is “excessive,” defeated rival lawmaker Robert Jenrick in a vote of almost 100,000 members of the right-of-center Conservatives.
She received 53,806 votes, while Jenrick got 41,388 votes from the 131,680 eligible electors. The party placed turnout at 72.8 percent.
The first Black woman leader of a major political party in the UK, Badenoch said becoming leader was an “enormous honour”, but that “the task that stands before us is tough.”
“The task that stands before us is tough but simple,” Badenoch said in a victory speech to a roomful of Conservative lawmakers, staff and journalists in London. She said the party’s job was to hold the Labour government to account, and to craft pledges and a plan for government.
Addressing the party’s election drubbing, she said “we have to be honest — honest about the fact that we made mistakes, honest about the fact that we let standards slip.”
“The time has come to tell the truth, to stand up for our principles, to plan for our future, to reset our politics and our thinking, and to give our party, and our country, the new start that they deserve,” Badenoch said.
The combative former equalities minister faces the daunting task of reuniting a divided and weakened party that was emphatically removed from power in July after 14 years in charge.
Born in London to Nigerian parents, Badenoch spent her childhood years in Lagos. She became an MP in 2017, and, in 2022, made her first bid for Conservative leader.
With forthright views on everything from what she calls identity politics to the value of officials, Badenoch attracts both strong admirers and detractors.
She 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. Returning the Tories to 10 Dawning Street in 2029, the next election cycle is her political burden