Kemi Badenoch, the new leader of the UK’s opposition Conservative Party, may be viewed as something of a divisive figure in British politics, but her robust views and "anti-woke" values proved vital in her successful campaign to replace former Conservative prime minister Rishi Sunak as the party’s leader.
She defeated former immigration minister Robert Jenrick, her last remaining rival for the leadership, by securing 56% of their vote. Her victory in the four-month-long campaign to find a new Conservative leader, which began when Sunak resigned from the post in the wake of the Tories' disastrous defeat to Labour in July’s general election, means that she becomes the first black woman to lead a major UK political party.
Under previous Conservative leaders, Badenoch has served in a host of cabinet positions and has not shied away from expressing her strong views on free markets and free speech. She has often courted controversy with her outspoken comments and is regarded as a fierce critic of the Left.
She has taken heat during the campaign for her criticisms of welfare payments for working mothers and government moves to boost wages for low-paid employees. She claims her understanding of the issues affecting working-class voters stems from her time working at McDonald’s as a teenager.
But while Badenoch has made history by becoming the first black woman to lead a British political party, she insists she is no fan of identity politics and has said publicly that the colour of her skin should be of no more importance than her eye or hair colour as she gets to work on the formidable task of restoring her party's battered fortunes.
The former business secretary in Sunak’s government has been unsparing in her analysis of what went wrong for the Conservatives at the last general election, when they suffered their worst defeat since 1832, losing 250 seats. Her main criticism of previous Tory leaders, from David Cameron to Sunak, is that they "talked Right, but governed Left".
A key argument in her campaign to become the party’s next leader was that the Conservatives needed to "stop acting like Labour" to win back power. It is a pledge she put at the heart of her Tory leadership campaign, which focused on changing the underlying mindset of the British state.
Early life and career
Born Olukemi Adegoke to Nigerian parents in the London suburb of Wimbledon in 1980, she was one of three children. Her father worked as a GP and her mother was a physiology professor, and she spent her early life in Lagos, Nigeria, before moving to the United States, where her mother lectured.
The family returned to live in the UK when she was aged 16, and she studied for her A-levels at a college in south London before enrolling in Sussex University to complete a degree in computer engineering. After graduation, she worked in IT while also gaining a second degree in law. She then moved into finance, becoming an associate director of private bank Coutts. Later, she worked as the digital director of the influential Conservative-supporting magazine The Spectator in a non-editorial role.
Badenoch joined the Conservative Party in 2005, aged 25, and unsuccessfully ran for Parliament in 2010 and the London Assembly in 2012, the year she married her husband, Hamish Badenoch. When two members of the London Assembly, the body responsible for running the British capital, including Suella Braverman, were elected MPs in 2015, she took a vacant Assembly seat.
She backed Brexit in the 2016 referendum before achieving her ambition of becoming an MP a year later for the safe Conservative seat of Saffron Walden in Essex. She saw off some bigger names when running to be Conservative leader in 2022 before she was knocked out in the penultimate round of voting by MPs.
Badenoch had spent three years in junior government roles when, in 2022, she joined the rapid ministerial exodus that brought down then-Prime Minister Boris Johnson.
To the surprise of many of her colleagues, Badenoch joined the contest to succeed Johnson despite never having been in the cabinet. What began as a longshot campaign, with the support mostly of loyal friends who also entered Parliament in 2017, quickly gained momentum, especially after she received the backing of Michael Gove, an influential figure in Conservative politics.
