British Conservatives have elected Kemi Badenoch as their new leader

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LONDON (AP) – Britain’s Conservative Party on Saturday chose Kemi Badenoch as its new leader as it tries to recover from a crushing election defeat that ended 14 years in power.

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Badenoch (pronounced BADE-enock), the first black woman to lead a major British political party, defeated rival lawmaker Robert Jenrick in a vote of nearly 100,000 right-wing Conservative members.

In online and postal voting by party members, she won 53,806 votes to Jenrick’s 41,388.

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, reducing their total to 121.

The new leader’s difficult task is to try to restore the party’s reputation after years of division, scandal and economic turmoil, disrupt Labor 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 in 2029.

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“The task before us is difficult but simple,” Badenoch said in a victory speech to a room full of Conservative lawmakers, staffers and journalists in London. She said the party’s job was to hold the Labor government to account and prepare a commitment and plan for government.

Referring to the party’s election mockery, she said: “We have to be honest – honest about the fact that we made mistakes, honest about the fact that we allowed standards to fall.”

“It is time to tell the truth, stand up for our principles, plan for the future, reset our politics and thinking, and give our party and our country the fresh start they deserve,” Badenoch said.

Badenoch, Sunak’s business secretary, was born in London to Nigerian parents and spent much of her childhood in the West African country.

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The 44-year-old former software engineer portrays herself as a disrupter, advocating a free market economy with low taxes and promising to “reprogram, 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 greenhouse gas emissions in the UK. During her leadership campaign, she faced criticism for saying that “not all cultures are equally important” and for suggesting that maternity pay was excessive.

Tim Bale, a professor of politics at Queen Mary University of London, said the Conservative Party was likely to “veer towards the right on both economic and social policy” under Badenoch.

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He predicted that Badenoch would pursue “what might be called a boat, boiler and bathroom strategy…. focusing very much on the transgender issue, the immigration issue and skepticism about progress towards net zero.”

While the Conservative Party is not representative of the country as a whole – its 132,000 members are mostly wealthy, older white men – its upper echelons have become much more diverse.

Badenoch is the third female Tory leader, after Margaret Thatcher and Liz Truss, to become prime minister. She is the second non-white leader of the Conservative Party after Sunak and the first with African roots. In contrast, the center-left Labor Party has always been led exclusively by white men.

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In a leadership contest that lasted more than three months, Conservative lawmakers whittled down the field from six candidates in a series of votes and then reassigned the final two to the broader party.

Both finalists came from the right wing of the party and argued that they could win back voters from Reform UK, the far-right, anti-immigration party led by populist politician Nigel Farage that has destroyed Conservative support.

But the party also lost many voters to the victorious Labor Party and the centrist Liberal Democrats, and some Conservatives fear that a rightward turn will alienate the party from public opinion.

Starmer’s first few months in office were difficult, plagued by negative headlines, a bleak fiscal situation and plummeting approval ratings.

But Bale said historical data shows Badenoch’s chances of leading the Conservatives back to power in 2029 are slim.

“It is quite unusual for someone to take power when the party has been beaten very badly and manage to lead it to electoral victory,” he said. “Yet Keir Starmer did exactly the same thing after 2019. So there are records to be broken.”

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