(Bloomberg) -- The UK Conservatives, ejected from power in a landslide electoral defeat just over three months ago, appear set to tack toward the right after Tory Members of Parliament narrowed down the race to lead the party to two right-wing contenders in Kemi Badenoch and Robert Jenrick.
Wednesday’s vote appeared to crystallize the ideological direction of the Tories through the shock elimination of the centrist former home and foreign secretary, James Cleverly, who as leader might have sought to win back voters from the governing Labour Party and the third force in British politics, the Liberal Democrats.
Instead, by choosing Badenoch or Jenrick, the party looks set to appeal to supporters lost to Nigel Farage’s anti-immigration Reform UK party on the right. Here’s a look at the two candidates, who will now be put to a vote among the wider party membership — which numbered around 150,000 in their last vote in 2022 — with a result due on Nov. 2:
Kemi Badenoch
After trailing other candidates in the three previous votes among Tory MPs, Badenoch surged to the top in the final round, and heads into the runoff as the favorite. A ConservativeHome survey of almost 800 Tory members last week gave her a 53%-33% lead in a runoff against Jenrick.
Badenoch, 44, is known for her abrasive manner and for picking fights with journalists or political opponents on the social media platform X. In media interviews during the recent Conservative Party conference, she sought to dispel that image, telling Sky News: “I don’t look for fights” while stressing “If you swing at me, I will swing back.”
Nevertheless, the British-Nigerian politician has campaigned on a platform to end “woke” policies and spent much of the Tory gathering courting controversy, earning criticism for saying that not all cultures are “equally valid,” maternity pay was “excessive,” the minimum wage was “over-burdening” businesses, and that up to 10% of civil servants should be in jail.
Badenoch was born in the UK to Nigerian parents, but spent her childhood in Lagos. After moving back to Britain at 16, she studied computing at the University of Sussex, earning a masters degree in engineering that she alluded to in her leadership pitch: “Engineers are realists,” she said last month. “We can plot a path from idea to reality.”
While working as a software engineer at Logica, Badenoch studied law part-time — and also joined the Conservatives. Stints followed at Royal Bank of Scotland Group, the private bank Coutts and the right-wing magazine The Spectator. She stood unsuccessfully for Parliament in 2010 and lost a bid for a place on the London Assembly in 2012, gaining one three years later.
In 2017, Badenoch secured election to the House of Commons in the Essex seat of Saffron Walden. A Brexit backer, she quickly drew attention as a rising star, and was talked about as a possible contender in 2019 leadership contest. In the event, she didn’t stand, instead backing Michael Gove.
Despite that, the victorious Boris Johnson made her a junior minister. She was among a slew of ministers to later quit as his government crumbled. She entered the ensuing leadership contest, placing fourth and establishing her mark as a potential future leader. The short-lasting winner, Liz Truss, put Badenoch in her cabinet as trade secretary — a role she retained in Rishi Sunak’s subsequent administration, with the remit for business later added.
Badenoch is married to a banker, Hamish Badenoch, and has three children. If she emerges victorious, she’ll be the first Black person to lead either of the UK’s two main political parties.
Robert Jenrick
After topping the first two rounds of the contest — but then losing support in the third vote — Jenrick’s position in the leadership race looked under threat going into Wednesday’s ballot, but in the event, he eked his way through, possibly because of tactical voting by Cleverly supporters going awry.
While polling among Tory members suggests Badenoch will beat Jenrick, 42, there’s no doubt he’s made inroads on the right of the party, after his reinvention in recent years from moderate centrist to a hardliner on immigration.
Born in Wolverhampton, central England, to a gas fitter and a secretary, he was privately educated at a local grammar school, though he’s sought to stress his working class roots. On the final day of the Tory conference, he told delegates that his father came to Birmingham to take a job at “the last great iron foundry in the Black Country,” to “get on in life.”
Jenrick studied history at the University of Cambridge before winning a scholarship to study political science at the University of Pennsylvania. On returning to the UK, he qualified as a lawyer and worked in London and Moscow for the corporate law firms Skadden, Arps and Sullivan & Cromwell.
He entered Parliament in 2014 by winning the seat of Newark in a special election, having unsuccessfully contested a different seat in 2010. That win was later marred by an Electoral Commission report which concluded the Conservative Party had exceeded spending limits in the by-election.
Still, Jenrick rose through the ranks, becoming a junior minister in the Treasury under Theresa May’s premiership, before backing Johnson to succeed her. Johnson rewarded him by making him Secretary of State for Housing, Communities and Local Government — the youngest member of his cabinet.
In 2020, Jenrick came under fire over his contacts with a property tycoon who wanted planning permission for a housing development and later donated to the Tory party — but survived in cabinet, although Johnson later shuffled him out. Johnson’s successor, Truss, made him a health minister, and after her, Rishi Sunak gave him a cabinet-attending post as immigration minister.
It was in that role that Jenrick’s shift to the right became apparent, and he quit his post arguing Sunak’s administration wasn’t taking a hard-line enough position on migration.
A one-time moderate who opposed Brexit prior to the 2016 referendum, Jenrick’s pivot rightwards left him advocating the UK’s departure from another institution, the European Convention on Human Rights, which he blamed for blocking Britain’s attempts to deport asylum seekers.
That’s now the headline promise of Jenrick’s campaign, as he seeks to make the Tories appeal once more to Reform defectors. He courted controversy with a social media video in which he he said the ECHR meant British soldiers were having to kill terrorism suspects rather than capturing them — a claim rebuffed by leadership rivals.
Leaving the ECHR is a controversial proposition for Tory moderates, and has implications for the peace agreement in Northern Ireland as well as the trade deal the UK signed with the European Union after Brexit.
The Jenrick campaign argues he is best placed to dispel the threat posed by Reform, with Ipsos polling suggesting he is the candidate most likely to win voters back from Farage’s outfit.
Jenrick is married and a father of three, confessing at the conference that he’d given his daughter the middle name Thatcher, after the 1980s Conservative Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher.
--With assistance from Ailbhe Rea.
©2024 Bloomberg L.P.