LONDON — Britain’s Conservative Party on Saturday elected Kemi Badenoch as its new leader as it tries to rebound from a crushing election defeat that ended 14 years in power.
The first Black woman to lead a major British political party, Badenoch (pronounced BADE-enock) defeated rival lawmaker Robert Jenrick in a vote of almost 100,000 members of the right-of-center Conservatives, also known as the Tories.
She got 53,806 votes in the online and postal ballot of party members, to Jenrick’s 41,388.
Prime Minister Keir Starmer congratulated Badenoch in a post on X, saying “The first Black leader of a Westminster party is a proud moment for our country. I look forward to working with you and your party in the interests of the British people.”
But many of the congratulations pouring in came layered with criticism. Labour Party Chair Ellie Reeves said “Kemi was part of the chaos of the last 14 years.”
Liberal Democrat leader Ed Davey acknowledged of the historic nature of her win on X but added, “Voters across the country believe her party is too divided, out-of-touch and unable to accept Conservative failures over the past years.”
“The election of Kemi Badenoch as leader has finalised the Tories’ lurch to the far right,” the Scottish National Party’s deputy leader, Keith Brown, said in a statement.
Badenoch sits on right edge of her center-right party, Tony Travers, a professor at the London School of Economics and Political Science told NBC News, and is seen by party members as someone who talks “common sense” and is likely the candidate that Labour least wanted to win.
“As the first Black leader of a major political party, she’s intriguingly positioned on issues to do with race,” Travers said. She is “way less enthusiastic about progressive interpretations of the position of people of color in society than many white people on the progressive left, which is going to be complicated for Labour to deal with.”
Badenoch replaces former Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, who in July led the Conservatives to their worst election result since 1832. The Conservatives lost more than 200 seats, taking their tally down to 121.
The new leader’s daunting task is to try to restore the party’s reputation after years of division, scandal and economic tumult, hammer Labour Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s policies on key issues including the economy and immigration, and return the Conservatives to power at the next election, due by 2029.
“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.
Travers says Badenoch will have to figure out whether the party should tilt further to the right, courting some supporters it lost to right-wing populist Nigel Farage’s Reform UK party, or “try to get back nearer the middle ground,” and appeal to the more centrist voters needed to win in a general election.
Despite what Travers calls a “historically terrible” result for the Conservatives, the “party has a remarkable capacity to regenerate and to recover and to fight back,” though it remains to be seen what a more fragmented political landscape might yield in the coming years.
In the United Kingdom, parliamentary elections are not held on fixed dates, but must be held at least every five years. Prime Ministers can choose when to hold them, and often try and do so when they feel confident they can win.
Addressing the party’s election drubbing, Badenoch 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.
A business secretary in Sunak’s government, Badenoch was born in London to Nigerian parents and spent much of her childhood in the West African country.
The 44-year-old former software engineer depicts herself as a disruptor, arguing for a low-tax, free-market economy and pledging to “rewire, reboot and reprogram” the British state.
A critic of multiculturalism and self-proclaimed enemy of wokeness Badenoch has criticized gender-neutral bathrooms and government plans to reduce U.K. carbon emissions. During the leadership campaign she drew criticism for saying that “not all cultures are equally valid,” and for suggesting that maternity pay was excessive.
Tim Bale, professor of politics at Queen Mary University of London, said the Conservative Party was likely to “swing towards the right both in terms of its economic policies and its social policies” under Badenoch.
He predicted Badenoch would pursue “what you might call the boats, boilers and bathrooms strategy …. focusing very much on the trans issue, the immigration issue and skepticism about progress towards net zero.”
While the Conservative Party is unrepresentative of the country as a whole — its 132,000 members are largely affluent, older white men — its upper echelons have become markedly more diverse.
Badenoch is the Tories’ third female leader, after Margaret Thatcher and Liz Truss, both of whom became prime minister. She’s the second Conservative leader from a non-white background, after Sunak, and the first with African roots. The center-left Labour Party, in contrast, has only ever been led by white men.
Badenoch is a combative politician known for taking on journalists, Labour politicians, and even the actor David Tennant. She called the Doctor Who star a “rich, lefty, white male celebrity so blinded by ideology he can’t see the optics of attacking the only black woman in government” after he told an awards ceremony earlier this year that he wished she would shut up.
She will get her first chance to show off as party leader when she faces Starmer on Wednesday at Prime Minister’s Questions (PMQs). The weekly political tradition features verbal sparring as the Prime Minister and Leader of the Opposition try an one-up each other in front of an often rowdy House of Commons.