(Bloomberg) -- Kemi Badenoch beat Robert Jenrick in the Conservative Party’s leadership contest to become the first Black leader of a major UK political party.
Badenoch, 44, received 53,806 votes to Jenrick’s 41,388 in a ballot of party members, Bob Blackman, chairman of the backbench 1922 Committee, which runs Tory leadership contests, said on Saturday. She takes over from former Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, who triggered the succession battle after leading the party to its worst ever defeat in the general election on July 4.
The former business secretary won 56.5% of valid votes, making it one of the tightest Tory leadership contests. It was a narrower victory than when former Prime Minister Liz Truss secured 57.4% of the vote in 2022 to beat Sunak.
“This is not just about the Conservative Party, it is about the people we want to bring back to the Conservative Party,” Badenoch said in her victory speech. She added that the party has “to be honest” about mistakes made during its previous time in power.
Badenoch now faces the daunting task of picking Britain’s main opposition party up from the ruins of that catastrophic loss — the Tories dropped to 121 seats from 365 in 2019 — and make it once again the electoral force that won four consecutive national ballots.
To do so, Badenoch “must play a key role by building the political consensus to tackle the issues holding back investment, such as planning reform, grid connections and more proportionate regulation,” said Rain Newton-Smith, chief executive of the Confederation of British Industry.
Her victory means the party is likely to pivot further to the right, though that shift was already baked in after the field was narrowed down to Badenoch and Jenrick, a former immigration minister who — though once a moderate — is now on the Tory right. Both ran their campaigns on a promise to slash immigration and return to “conservative” principles, defeating four rivals in successive votes among Tory members of parliament to make the runoff last month.
The strategy is a gamble that the Tories have more to gain from appealing to the voters they lost to Nigel Farage’s Reform UK party — which took just five seats in July but won more than 4 million votes — than by tacking to the center in an effort to win back those who defected to Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s Labour Party and the Liberal Democrats.
For Rob Ford, professor of political science at the University of Manchester, Badenoch will need to find a way to appeal to a broader array of voters in order to win office at the next general election, which Labour must hold by mid-2029. The Conservatives “cannot afford to be a one-trick pony if they have serious aspirations to return to government,” he said, referring to immigration.
Badenoch becomes the fourth woman to lead the Conservatives — after former premiers Margaret Thatcher, Theresa May and Liz Truss. She’s also the first Black person of either gender to lead what are traditionally the three main UK-wide parties: the Tories, Labour or the Liberal Democrats.
The new Tory leader was born in Britain but grew up in Nigeria before returning to the UK at 16. But her background — and her recent tenure as minister for women and equalities — does not necessarily make her a standard-bearer for minority groups. As a politician, she has been vocally anti-immigration and is likely to put regulation and “woke culture” in the cross-hairs of Tory policy.
During the leadership race, she promised to reduce the role of the government in business and tackle the increasingly “left-wing mindset” of the UK. “Government does not create growth — business creates growth,” she has said.
At the Tory Party conference in September, she courted controversy by 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.
While that bluntness is seen as a strength by her allies, Badenoch has also been criticized as rude and abrasive by some colleagues — charges she’s rejected, telling the BBC’s Newscast podcast this week that “I just think I’m saying something that I wouldn’t mind hearing back.”
Badenoch has spent the campaign largely steering clear of setting detailed policy, saying her party first needs to rebuild. An engineer by training, she has repeatedly said she will take an engineer’s approach to government. By her definition, that means a more deliberate and methodical approach to implementing policy than that promised by Jenrick.
She shied away from matching his flagship promise of pulling the UK out of the European Convention on Human Rights in a bid to be able to more easily deport migrants, saying it wouldn’t be a “silver bullet” and could lead to unintended consequences and repercussions.
In an interview with GB News on Thursday, Badenoch said she wanted to bring back “authentic conservatism.” The party needed “confidence in our values, and we need a leader who is brave and courageous enough to actually say what needs to be said,” she added.
Still, almost a third of Tory voters have an unfavorable view of Badenoch, according to a YouGov poll released Saturday. About 20% of Britons think she would make a better prime minister than Starmer, against 27% who think the Labour leader is the better choice.
(Adds details on voting in paragraph three, Badenoch quote in paragraph four, reaction from the CBI in paragraph six and YouGov poll in the final paragraph.)
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