Who is Kemi Badenoch, new leader of UK's Conservative Party who will replace Rishi Sunak?

Kemi Badenoch defeated rival lawmaker Robert Jenrick on Saturday to become the new leader of Britain’s Conservative Party, also known as the Tories.

The self-proclaimed straight speaker has vowed a return to “authentic conservatism” to rebuild a party facing an uphill struggle to return to power.

Badenoch replaces former Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, pledging to lead the party through a period of renewal, saying it had veered towards the political centre by “governing from the left” and must return to its traditional ideas.

Here’s all we know about her.

About Kemi Badenoch

Badenoch, 44, was born in London’s Wimbledon suburb and raised in Nigeria by her Nigerian father and mother.

She returned to London at the age of 16, looking for a better life. When not at school, she supported herself by working at McDonald’s.

Badenoch, a University of Sussex graduate in computer science, left the banking industry to enter politics.

At the age of 25, she joined the Conservative Party and advanced swiftly, first serving in the London Assembly before being elected to the parliament in 2017.

Two years later, she was named Parliamentary under Secretary of State for Children and Families by Prime Minister Boris Johnson.

In 2021, she advanced to the position of Equalities Minister. In 2022, she was named secretary of state for international trade by Liz Truss, Johnson’s successor.

Her rapid rise was accompanied by a number of run-ins with the media, celebrities, and her own officials, but it was also accompanied by a spike in support from the Conservative administration at the time, who respected her straightforward style.

Badenoch is an out-and-out Brexiteer, which has won her strong support among Conservative voters. She had called Britain’s vote to leave the European Union “the greatest ever vote of confidence in the project of the United Kingdom."

Often labelled a “culture warrior” – a tag she disputes – she has been vocal on issues like gender-neutral toilets (she is against them), reports BBC.

Badenoch, the first Black woman leader of a major political party in Britain, has also been in the news often since former Prime Minister Rishi Sunak declared he was resigning after the Conservatives’ crushing defeat.

The last two candidates for party leader were her and Robert Jenrick, a former immigration minister in Sunak’s government who shares Badenoch’s right-wing views.

Controversies in the past

Well-known Scottish actor David Tennant said in June he wanted her to “shut up” and wished she “did not exist any more” over her views on transgender and women’s rights.

“I will not shut up,” Badenoch responded on X, calling him “a rich, lefty, white male celebrity so blinded by ideology” that he couldn’t see the optics of attacking the only Black woman in government.

She also faced a backlash when she said five to 10 per cent of civil servants, or apolitical officials working in government, were “very bad” and “should be in prison” for undermining ministers - a comment her team said was a joke.

Comments that maternity pay was “excessive” and people should exercise “more personal responsibility” also raised eyebrows - again she said she had been misrepresented.

While some might see such slip-ups as a problem, Badenoch sees her straight talking as an asset, one she says has helped her work well in teams in government.

“A lot of people are not used to a politician who says it like it is,” she said at the party conference.

“That is what we need to do now in this age where everybody has a short attention span, you need people who can cut through very quickly and communicate our values clearly, I think I can do that.”

Her plans for the Conservatives

Badenoch is certain to shake up the Conservatives who suffered their worst election defeat in July under former leader and prime minister, Rishi Sunak.

In her sights is not just the left-leaning Labour government but also the right-wing populist Reform UK party led by veteran Brexit campaigner Nigel Farage, whose appeal drew traditional Conservative voters to his cause in July’s election.

But the anticipated swing to the right under Badenoch could alienate the more moderate wing of the party and some voters who were won over by the centrist Liberal Democrats at the election, when Labour won a landslide victory.

“So here is what we are going to do. We are going to rewrite the rules of the game,” she told the Conservative Party’s annual conference in the central English city of Birmingham earlier this year.

“Some people say I like a fight. I can’t imagine where they got that idea. But it’s not true, I do not like to fight but I’m not afraid to fight,” she said, pledging to go into combat against “left-wing nonsense” and for Conservative ideals.

Badenoch says growing up in a place where “fear was everywhere” made her appreciate the safety of Britain and become a true defender of Conservative principles such as “free speech, free enterprise and free markets”.

She says the administrations of former prime ministers such as Sunak and Boris Johnson gave up those principles in favour of an approach that meant the party “spoke right and governed left”, handing votes to other parties.

She credits her father, a doctor who died in 2022, for teaching her to not be “afraid to do the right thing no matter what people said.”

Some critics say she is light on policy, but she says this is moot at a time when the Conservative Party is out of power. She called her leadership campaign “Renewal 2030” rather than using her name, a sign she believes the party needs time to recover to win power. The next election is due in 2029.

With inputs from Reuters