Badenoch elected new leader of Britain’s Conservative Party

LONDON – “Anti-woke” candidate Kemi Badenoch on Nov 2 won the vote to become the Conservative Party’s new leader, replacing Mr Rishi Sunak who quit after the party’s disastrous showing in the July general election in Britain.

Ms Badenoch, 44, came out on top in a two-horse race with former immigration minister Robert Jenrick, as decided by party members.

She had been the favourite to win the vote and replace former prime minister Sunak. The latter

announced his departure

as party leader after presiding over the resounding general election defeat on July 5.

Ms Badenoch 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.

She will become the official leader of the opposition and face off against Labour’s Mr Keir Starmer in the House of Commons every Wednesday for the traditional Prime Minister’s Questions.

She will be leading a much-reduced cohort of Tory MPs in the chamber following the party’s disastrous election showing.

The new leader must plot a strategy to regain public trust while stemming a 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 include many centrists.

Ms 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 said it “talked right but governed left”.

According to Blue Ambition, a biography written by Conservative peer Michael Ashcroft, Ms Badenoch became “radicalised” into right-wing politics while at university in Britain.

He described her view of student activists there as the “spoiled, entitled, privileged metropolitan elite-in-training”.

Ms Badenoch describes herself as a straight-talker, a trait that has caused controversy on the campaign trail.

When addressing immigration, she said “our country is not a dormitory for people to come here and make money” and that “not all cultures are equally valid” when deciding who should be allowed to live in Britain.

She was widely criticised after suggesting that statutory maternity pay on small businesses was “excessive”.

Ms Badenoch sparked further furore when she joked that up to 10 per cent of Britain’s half a million civil servants were so bad that they “should be in prison”. AFP