Nigerian born Kemi Badenoch on Saturday won the vote to become the UK Conservatives’ new leader, replacing Rishi Sunak who quit after the party’s disastrous defeat in July’s general election.
Badenoch, 44, came out on top in the two-horse race with former immigration minister Robert Jenrick, winning 57 percent of the votes of party members.
She has been clear about how Nigeria has influenced her political thought; in particular her hostility to state provision of services.
“Growing up in Nigeria I saw real poverty—I experienced it, including living without electricity and doing my homework by candlelight, because the state electricity board could not provide power, and fetching water in heavy, rusty buckets from a bore-hole a mile away, because the nationalised water company could not get water out of the taps”, she told the House of Commons in her maiden speech.
Badenoch has taken a hard line on immigration, saying, “We cannot be naïve and assume immigrants will automatically abandon ancestral ethnic hostilities at the border, or that all cultures are equally valid. They are not.”
She said that becoming party leader was an “enormous honour”, but that “the task that stands before us is tough”.
“It is time to get down to business, it is time to renew,” she added.
The combative former equalities minister now faces the daunting task of reuniting a divided and weakened party that was emphatically ousted from power in July after 14 years in charge.
Badenoch will become the official leader of the opposition and face off against Labour’s Keir Starmer in the House of Commons every Wednesday for the traditional Prime Minister’s Questions.
However, she will be leading a much-reduced cohort of Tory MPs in the chamber following the party’s dismal election showing.
Having campaigned on a right-wing platform, she also faces the prospect of future difficulties within the ranks of Tory lawmakers, which includes many centrists.
Badenoch, born in London to Nigerian parents and raised in Lagos, has called for a return to conservative values, accusing her party of having become increasingly liberal on societal issues such as gender identity.
She describes herself as a straight-talker, a trait that has caused controversy on the campaign trail.
She was widely criticised after suggesting that statutory maternity pay on small businesses was “excessive” and sparked further furore when she joked that up to 10 percent of Britain’s half a million civil servants were so bad that they “should be in prison”.
