Kemi Badenoch becomes first Black woman to lead Britain’s Conservative Party

LONDON — Britain’s Conservative Party announced Saturday that it had selected Kemi Badenoch as its leader, putting a charismatic, often combative, right-wing firebrand at the helm of a party that suffered a crushing election defeat in July.

Badenoch, 44, whose parents were immigrants from Nigeria, becomes the first Black woman to head a party that has had three other female leaders — Margaret Thatcher, Theresa May and Liz Truss. She succeeds Rishi Sunak, who became the first nonwhite British prime minister after taking over the Tories, Britain’s oldest party, in 2022.

“It is the most enormous honor to be elected to this role, to lead the party that I love, the party that has given me so much,” a smiling Badenoch said to a group of Conservative Party members after being announced the winner. “I hope that I will be able to repay that debt.”

There is no guarantee, despite her swift ascent, that Badenoch will ever get to No. 10 Downing St. The Labour Party’s landslide victory gave it a huge majority in Parliament and the Tories face at least four years in opposition before the next election is due.

While the Labour prime minister, Keir Starmer, has gotten off to a shaky start, his party remains more popular than the Conservatives, who left voters frustrated and exhausted after 14 turbulent years in government.

In a lively, occasionally bitter leadership contest, Badenoch defeated Robert Jenrick, another former Cabinet minister, by a vote of 53,806 to 41,388 among the party’s 130,000 or so dues-paying members (about 73% voted). She and Jenrick emerged as the two finalists in a multiple-round contest that left the members with an unexpectedly narrow choice of two candidates from the party’s right.

Badenoch has vowed to rebuild the party on more authentically conservative foundations, saying her training as a computer engineer had taught her how to fix problems. She speaks often of “first principles” like freedom and individual responsibility. And she has not hesitated to wade into thorny issues like transgender rights or Britain’s colonial legacy, deploring “woke” ideology and “nasty identity politics.”

In her brief speech, Badenoch vowed to “reset our politics and our thinking” and to be “honest about the fact that we made mistakes.” But she did not lay out any new policy positions, in keeping with her refusal during the contest to be pinned down on specific policies.

“It’s quite unusual to go into a leadership contest eschewing the idea that you need to put together policies for the party,” said Tim Bale, a professor of politics and an expert on the Conservative Party at Queen Mary University of London.

Badenoch, he said, was also distinguished by her outspoken style and willingness to get into fierce debates over issues. He has described her as a “thinking man’s Thatcherite cultural warrior.”

That suggests the Conservatives could be in for an unpredictable, even bumpy, stretch as the main opposition party. Her predecessor, Sunak, was a more technocratic, if also occasionally querulous, figure.

And it is not clear, given the size of Labour’s majority, how much Badenoch can hope to achieve as leader of the opposition — a post that is sometimes described as the worst in British politics because of the dearth of power and shrunken media attention.

Like Sunak, whose parents are of Indian heritage, Badenoch’s story captures a slice of Britain’s varied immigrant experience. Born in London to a mother who was a physiology professor and a father who was a doctor, she spent her formative years in Lagos, Nigeria, where her family lived a comfortable life.

After political and economic upheaval swept Nigeria, her family’s fortunes abruptly declined. Years later, she recalled doing homework by candlelight during power outages and fetching water from a nearby well because the taps had run dry. She moved back to Britain at 16, taking a part-time job at a McDonald’s while she studied.

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In a recent BBC interview, Badenoch described her early years back in Britain as a time of little money and low expectations. When she spoke of her ambition to become a doctor, she recalled, people asked her why she wouldn’t be content to be a nurse. Instead, she became a software engineer.

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“To all intents and purposes, I am a first-generation immigrant,” Badenoch said after being elected to Parliament in 2017. In her well-received first speech, she quoted both Edmund Burke and Woody Allen.

Badenoch presents her British nationality as a stroke of good fortune — one that has instilled deep patriotism in someone who was raised “somewhere where the lights didn’t come on, where we ran out of fuel.”

She has joined calls for Britain to cut back the recent influx of immigrants, though she has avoided the kinds of strict, numeric targets embraced by Jenrick. And she has rejected his demand that Britain commit to withdrawing from the European Convention on Human Rights, a post-World War II treaty, because he says it obstructs efforts to control Britain’s borders.

Badenoch’s views on immigration have evolved along with those of the rest of her party. In comments from 2018 that recently resurfaced, she welcomed the Conservative government’s proposal to relax restrictions on visas for skilled migrants. She said she has since changed her mind.

On immigration policy, Badenoch now says, “numbers matter but culture matters more.” The most important criteria, she said, are “who is coming into our country and what do they want to do here?”

A confirmed Brexiteer, Badenoch rose rapidly in the governments of Boris Johnson, Truss and Sunak. She worked first as minister of state for equalities in the Johnson government. Truss then appointed her secretary of state for international trade, and Sunak later named her to head a newly created Department for Business and Trade.

Along the way, Badenoch has sparred with journalists, opposition figures, members of her own party, and even allies such as Michael Gove, a former Tory minister who spoke warmly about her leadership bid.

Badenoch met her husband, Hamish, a managing director at Deutsche Bank, through the Conservative Party when they were both activists and he was on the list of candidates approved to run for Parliament. They have two daughters and a son.

“One day he said to me ‘I think you are a lot better at this than I ever would be, and I think you should go for it, and I will support you all the way,’” Badenoch told the BBC in the recent interview.

Her ascent troubles some in Britain, who believe that, despite her status as the first Black leader of the Conservatives, she could set back the cause of racial justice and equality because of her right-wing views.

“The question on the left is: Is this a cynical performative device by the right to champion an anti-woke, Black, right-wing politician to challenge antiracist policies, and therefore will it have regressive consequences?” said Sunder Katwala, the director of British Future, a research institute.

Katwala said he preferred to think of Badenoch as representing a kind of “migrant patriotism” — the idea that “migrants choose the country and the rest of you are born in it and don’t know how lucky you are.”

Badenoch’s political views, he said, “are very authentic,” and understandable in the context of a life that took her from privilege and comfort in Nigeria to a tough new start and hard-won success in Britain.

“It’s just that her life experience is quite an unusual Black British story,” Katwala said.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

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