Kemi Badenoch: UK Conservatives’ new leader fighting ‘left-wing nonsense’
Al Jazeera
She was a passionate supporter of Brexit and threw her weight behind the much-maligned Rwanda deportation scheme. But what else does she bring as leader?
The election of Kemi Badenoch, a 44-year-old former software engineer, to the leadership of the UK’s Conservative Party – the first Black woman to lead a major British political party – comes at the end of a protracted contest triggered by the worst electoral defeat in the party’s history in July this year.
Following the resignation of incumbent Conservative leader Rishi Sunak, six candidates put themselves forward for leadership, their numbers being whittled down to two through a series of votes by the party’s MPs.
Conservative Party members were then balloted on the final two, Badenoch and former Minister of State for Immigration Robert Jenrick, concluding this weekend a process four months in the making.
While her supporters celebrated the opportunity for “change” and “renewal” that Badenoch promised in her victory speech on Saturday, her critics, such as the Scottish National Party’s deputy leader, Keith Brown, claimed Badenoch’s appointment as Conservative leader has “finalised the Tories’ (the Conservative Party’s) lurch to the far right”.
Promises of renewal from the new leader would have sounded like manna from heaven to a Conservative Party still recovering from the electoral mauling it received in the UK’s general election in June of this year, which saw the Tory Party’s share of seats within the 650 seat House of Commons reduced from 372 to 121; the worst loss in its history.
