The election of Kemi Badenoch, a 44-year-old former software engineer, to the leadership of the UK’s Conservative Party – the first Black woman to lead a major British political party – comes at the end of a protracted contest triggered by the worst electoral defeat in the party’s history in July this year.
Following the resignation of incumbent Conservative leader Rishi Sunak, six candidates put themselves forward for leadership, their numbers being whittled down to two through a series of votes by the party’s MPs.
Conservative Party members were then balloted on the final two, Badenoch and former Minister of State for Immigration Robert Jenrick, concluding this weekend a process four months in the making.
While her supporters celebrated the opportunity for “change” and “renewal” that Badenoch promised in her victory speech on Saturday, her critics, such as the Scottish National Party’s deputy leader, Keith Brown, claimed Badenoch’s appointment as Conservative leader has “finalised the Tories’ (the Conservative Party’s) lurch to the far right”.
Promises of renewal from the new leader would have sounded like manna from heaven to a Conservative Party still recovering from the electoral mauling it received in the UK’s general election in June of this year, which saw the Tory Party’s share of seats within the 650 seat House of Commons reduced from 372 to 121; the worst loss in its history.
However, how far the new leader’s forthright and, to her critics, divisive, style of leadership will go in restoring Conservative fortunes remains to be seen.
An affluent childhood
Olukemi Olufunto Adegoke was born in January 1980, the daughter of a Nigerian doctor, in a relatively affluent suburb of London while her mother was in the country receiving medical treatment. Badenoch spent the bulk of her childhood in Nigeria, and the United States, where her mother, a professor of physiology at the University of Lagos, travelled extensively on lecture tours.
Badenoch’s relatively affluent life in Lagos, where her father owned a hospital and later a publishing company, came to a halt with the economy’s collapse and Nigeria’s dictatorial government’s suspension from the commonwealth in 1995.
With her father unemployed and her mother working full time as a lecturer in Lagos, Badenoch was sent to the UK to escape what her parents saw as Nigeria’s imminent collapse, arriving in London aged 16 and with just 100 British pounds ($130) in her pocket to stay with a family friend.
Supporting herself through working at McDonald’s, an experience she later claimed made her “working class”, Badenoch went on to study computer systems engineering at the University of Sussex, graduating in 2003.
“People often ask what made me a Conservative, and there was no one thing,” she told The Times newspaper earlier this year. “But part of it was being at Sussex among snotty, middle-class north Londoners who couldn’t get into Oxbridge,” she said, referring to the UK’s elite universities, Oxford and Cambridge.
“One of the things that drove me insane was how they talked about Africa,” she continued. “So high-minded: ‘We need to help Africans’; ‘Let’s boycott Nestle, because they make African mothers give their babies powdered milk’,” she said, drawing on what she said was her experience of many of these issues as the daughter of a doctor in Nigeria.
“These stupid lefty white kids didn’t know what they were talking about,” she said, “And that instinctively made me think, ‘These are not my people’.”
Badenoch’s comments about Nigeria – a country in which, she told the UK’s Daily Mail newspaper in mid-October, she had never felt safe, telling reporters that she had carried a machete to school out of fear of violence – drew fierce criticism from her childhood home.
Her comments drew an angry response on X, formerly Twitter, from Nigeria’s former Minister for Aviation Femi Fani-Kayode, who branded Badenoch a “stupid little girl”.
Political and cultural warrior
First elected as the member of parliament for North West Essex in 2017, Badenoch gave a maiden speech to the House of Commons that revealed much about the future Conservative leader.
Describing herself as a “first-generation immigrant”, she went on to cite her political heroes as the UK’s wartime leader, Winston Churchill, the Conservative politician Airey Neave, who was assassinated by the Irish Republican Army (IRA) in 1979, and the equally combative earlier Tory leader, Margaret Thatcher.
Styling herself an “anti-woke” politician, Badenoch has seen controversy, both sought and inflicted, accompany her political rise under a rapid succession of Conservative leaders who served as prime minister between 2019 and 2024. Under Theresa May, who was prime minister for three years from 2016 to 2019, she was appointed to the party’s Justice Select Committee. She continued her rise in a succession of roles under Boris Johnson, serving most prominently as minister of state for women and equalities as well as minister of state for housing, communities and local government, later retitled minister of state for levelling up communities.
Badenoch also served as secretary of state for international trade in the short-lived premiership of Liz Truss, who held power for just 49 days from September 6, 2022 to October 25 the same year, after the resignation of Boris Johnson. Badenoch entered the contest for leadership that time as well, before ultimately endorsing Truss’s successor, Rishi Sunak, for leader.
Under Sunak’s administration, she was appointed secretary of state for international trade, with the additional role of minister for women and equalities. In a cabinet reshuffle of February 2022, Badenoch was moved to the newly created Department for Business and Trade, while retaining her equalities brief.
Badenoch describes herself as a “first-generation immigrant” but has nevertheless pursued a hard line on migration, a bete noire for many within the Conservative Party.
In October, she told the BBC: “We need to make sure that when people are coming to this country they are people who are coming to contribute and who want the success of our country.” She continued: “If you want to stay here we live in an age where you need to be very committed. We are not a dormitory, we are not a sponge.”
While critical of aspects of previous Conservative governments, principally what she has said was its tendency to “talk right, but govern left”, she has nevertheless proven a staunch defender of much of the Conservative’s past.
On Sunday, the day after her victory, she dismissed the widespread public outrage over the revelations that a series of parties had been held at Downing Street during the period of the UK’s strict COVID-19 lockdown as “overblown”. She also took the opportunity to praise Boris Johnson as a “great prime minister”.
A keen supporter of the UK’s since-abandoned scheme to deport all undocumented migrant arrivals to Rwanda for processing, Badenoch dismissed concerns about the destination’s safety, telling a radio station in May that she knew someone who was “having a very lovely gap year there”.
Last month, Human Rights Watch criticised Rwanda for its treatment of commentators, journalists, opposition activists and others who speak out on current affairs and criticise public policy. They “continued to face abusive prosecutions, enforced disappearances, and have at times died under unexplained circumstances”, Human Rights Watch stated.
However, in marked contrast to her opponent, Robert Jenrick, Badenoch has ruled out leaving the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR), blamed by some for the ultimate failure of the Rwanda scheme.
Asked how she would deal with illegal migration to the UK at her campaign launch in September, Badenoch conceded there were no “silver bullets”, saying “People throwing out numbers and saying we’ll leave the ECHR are giving easy answers. That’s how we got in this mess in the first place.”
Fighting for leadership
“Some people say I like a fight,” Badenoch told the Conservative Party Conference as she competed for its leadership this summer. “I can’t imagine where they got that idea. But it’s not true, I do not like to fight but I’m not afraid to fight.” She pledged to go into combat against “left-wing nonsense” such as calls for what she sees as burdensome regulation and causes highlighting the rights of some minorities.
Badenoch’s battles have seen her confront both the media, as well as members of her own party in what she has claimed is her battle for less regulation and a small state, commenting in characteristically combative style during the Conservative Party Conference in early October that around 10 percent of the UK’s civil servants, guilty in Badenoch’s eyes of “leaking official secrets, undermining their ministers … agitating”, were “so bad they should be in jail”.
Badenoch weighed in on a row about maternity pay in the UK when she told Times Radio in late September that she thought the rate at which employers were obliged to pay maternity pay was too high.
Despite her stance, she later confronted MP Christopher Chope, described in the UK press as a “staunch right-winger and traditionalist” who expressed concern about how much time Badenoch, a mother of three, would be spending with her family if she were to win the leadership of the Conservative Party. Responding to Chope’s comments, Badenoch reminded the veteran MP: “It isn’t always women who have parental responsibilities, men do, too.” Badenoch’s husband is Hamish Badenoch, a banker and Tory activist.
As well as the issue of rights for working parents, Badenoch has taken a similarly right-wing approach to other issues during the leadership challenge.
In September, she signalled her unequivocal support for Israel in its war on Gaza, referring to what she calls the country’s “moral clarity”.
Badenoch also attracted environmentalists’ anger when she branded the UK’s net zero aims as “unilateral economic disarmament” early in the leadership contest.
She has rounded on her critics in the media, branding one journalist who queried why she had not appeared in a video promoting COVID-19 vaccines as “creepy and bizarre“.
She has also campaigned on various issues relating to identity, opposing the teaching of critical race theory in schools, for instance. Badenoch has also been outspoken on other issues, opposing the creation of gender-neutral toilets, as well as saying in June that, were the Conservatives to win the election, they would block transgender women from certain female-only spaces, such as hospital wards and sports events.
She has also opposed fresh legislation banning conversion therapy, intended to “cure” homosexuality, arguing instead that, in addition to existing laws opposed to the practice, she did not “intend to stop those who wish to seek spiritual counselling as they explore their sexual orientation”.
Like her political hero, Margaret Thatcher, Badenoch is also an avowed believer in the power of the free market and an opponent of the regulation she regards as a block to economic growth.
In a pamphlet released as part of her leadership campaign, Conservatism in Crisis, Badenoch railed against “an ever-expanding regulatory state” whose solution to any problem was to drive “government to intervene to spend more money, without addressing the real issues that caused these problems”.
Challenges and challengers
The Conservative Party that Badenoch is taking on is one facing threats unparalleled in its 190 years.
In addition to the increasingly centrist Labour Party to its left, it also faces internal division and fresh challenges to its right, as the upstart Reform Party of Nigel Farage, which campaigns primarily on an anti-immigration policy, competes for much of its traditional right-wing base.
Badenoch’s victory, while historic, was no landslide. In her competition against the equally right-wing Robert Jenrick, the final tally was the closest in Conservative Party history, meaning the new leader begins her tenure on far from sure ground, analysts say, with potential challengers looming to both the centre and the still further right wing of the party.
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