Kemi Badenoch has been elected as the new leader of the UK Conservatives, replacing Rishi Sunak. She has pledged to regain voters who have abandoned the party.
Kemi Badenoch has been elected as the new leader of the UK’s Conservatives in a vote held on Saturday. She replaces Rishi Sunak and becomes the first black woman to lead a major British political party.
Badenoch, born in the UK and raised in Nigeria, defeated her opponent MP Robert Jenrick by 12,418 votes, according to the BBC. In her victory speech, the 44-year-old, who became an MP in 2017 after a career in banking and IT, vowed to revitalize the party following its worst defeat in the general election in July.
She also emphasized the need to “bring back” voters who have left the Conservatives, asserting that the party is “critical to the success of our country.”
Badenoch insisted that, to be heard, the party must be more honest and acknowledge that it has “made mistakes” and “let standards slip” over the past 14 years while in charge of the British government.
The British Labour Party defeated the Conservatives in a historic parliamentary election in July, gaining control of the nation’s government. The Tories suffered their worst-ever election defeat, while Labour’s landslide victory brought a new party to power for the first time in 14 years.
Like Liz Truss and Boris Johnson before him, Sunak oversaw a historic decline in Britain’s standard of living and a rise in energy costs and inflation, both of which surged after the UK severed ties with Russian fossil fuels in 2022.