Who is the new Tory leader and what does she stand for?

Like her political hero Margaret Thatcher, Kemi Badenoch – who is the new Conservative leader – divides opinion even within her own party.

Her robust views, “anti-awakening” values ​​and no-nonsense style made her a darling of the conservative right and grassroots party, and they elected her over fellow right-winger Robert Jenrick.

As the first black woman to lead a major political party in the UK, she has made history, but she is not a fan of identity politics and is not likely to do much of it as she gets down to the formidable job of restore the ruined fortunes of his party.

The former business secretary’s analysis of what went wrong for the Tories in the general election is that they “talked right but governed left” and must “stop acting like Labour” to win back power.

It is a pledge she has made central to her Conservative leadership campaign, which has focused on changing the basic mindset of the British state rather than setting out detailed policies.

Born in Wimbledon in 1980, Olukemi Adegoke was one of three children of Nigerian parents. Her father worked as a general practitioner and her mother was a physiology teacher.

Badenoch – she married banker Hamish Badenoch in 2012 and they have three children – grew up in Lagos, Nigeria and in the United States, where her mother lectured.

She returned to the UK at the age of 16 to live with a friend of her mother’s due to the worsening political and economic situation in Nigeria and studied at a college in South London while working in a McDonald’s restaurant and other part. .

After completing a computer engineering degree at Sussex University, he worked in IT while also gaining a second law degree.

He then moved into finance, becoming an associate director of private bank Coutts and later worked as digital director of the influential Tory-supporting magazine The Spectator, a non-editorial role.

According to Blue Ambition, a biography written by Sussex University conservative Lord Ashcroft, Badenoch acquired a taste for right-wing politics – becoming “radicalised” by left-wing campus culture in the opposite direction.

She later described the student activists there as “the pampered, entitled and privileged metropolitan elite in the making”.

Badenoch joined the Conservative Party in 2005 – aged 25 – and ran unsuccessfully for Parliament in 2010 and the London Assembly in 2012.

When two Tory Assembly members, including Suella Braverman, were elected MPs in 2015, she filled a vacant seat in the Assembly.

She backed Brexit in the 2016 referendum before fulfilling her ambition to become an MP a year later for the safe Tory seat of Saffron Walden in Essex.

Badenoch spent three years bouncing around junior government roles when, in 2022, he joined the rapid ministerial exodus that brought down Boris Johnson.

To the surprise of many of her colleagues, Badenoch then joined the extended contest to succeed Johnson, although she was never in the cabinet.

What started as a long-running campaign, supported largely by loyal friends who also entered Parliament in 2017, quickly gained momentum and heavyweight support in the form of Michael Gove.

Badenoch eventually came fourth with the support of 59 MPs – more than the 42 MPs that were enough for her to come out on top in the parliamentary stage of the current leadership election.

Her direct approach, instructing colleagues to “tell the truth”, won Badenoch a bigger role in the Conservative Party and it was inevitable that Liz Truss would choose to appoint her to the cabinet – making her International Trade Secretary.

Rishi Sunak retained her in the post, adding the business and women and equality briefs.

Her time in Parliament was characterized by her simplicity and willingness to engage in controversial issues.

As junior equalities minister under Johnson, she angered many on the left when she challenged the idea that there was widespread institutional racism in Britain.

In an LBC interview, she said she only suffered prejudice from lefties.

“I came to this country at the age of 16 and now I’m prime minister – isn’t that amazing? I was born in this country, but I didn’t grow up here.

“I don’t understand why people want to ignore all the good stuff and just focus on the bad stuff and use the bad stuff to tell the story,” she added.

She calls herself a critical gender feminist and has been an outspoken opponent of moves to allow self-certification of transgender identity.

As cabinet minister responsible for women and equalities, she led the UK government’s blocking of Scotland’s gender recognition reform bill.

Responding to the Cass report into gender identity services in the NHS, she said they had been “hijacked by ideologues” while critics had been “bullied”, leading to children being hurt.

She also opposed gender-neutral restrooms.

In 2021, members of the government’s LGBT+ advisory group urged it to “consider its position” over its failure to deliver on its manifesto pledge to ban so-called conversion therapy.

Badenoch is often labeled a “culture warrior,” but she disputes the label.

Sometimes accused of wanting to start a fight in an empty room, she says she doesn’t like to fight – but is prepared to fight to defend Tory principles.

This is both what endears her to Tory MPs and what worries some of them.

In the early stages of the leadership election, several Tory MPs told the BBC they were inclined to back Badenoch, but were put off by volatile interactions while she was in government.

For her supporters, that’s the point: unlike other ministers, she has been willing to tell MPs what she thinks and make the case directly.

On the eve of this year’s party conference in Birmingham, she made headlines by claiming that not all cultures are “equally valid”, citing as an example “cultures where women are told they shouldn’t work”. .

She also attracted attention in Birmingham for joking that 5-10% of civil servants were so bad they should be in prison. She previously strongly denied assaulting officials.

But she backtracked after an interview in which she he seemed to suggest the current level of maternity pay was “excessive”. She claimed her words had been “misrepresented”, saying she spoke about over-regulation of businesses and that maternity pay was “a good thing”.

In 2018, Badenoch admitted that a decade earlier she had hacked the website of then Commons leader and deputy Labor leader Harriet Harman as a prank. Harman accepted her apology.

Among public outcry in February, she accused the Post Office chair she sacked of seeking “revenge” by “making up” claims she was told to delay compensation payments to sub-postmasters affected by the Horizon IT scandal.

Henry Staunton said he was told to freeze the payments to allow the government to “limp to the election”, apparently to ease the public finances.

Conservatism “in crisis”

Nor has Badenoch shied away from public confrontations with MPs on her side – including when she rejected calls to make it illegal to discriminate against people going through the menopause.

Appearing before a joint committee, she told chairman Caroline Nokes that “a lot of people” want to use the equality law as “a tool for different agendas and vested interests”.

During his leadership campaign, Badenoch spoke of Conservatism being “in crisis” – under attack from a new “progressive ideology” involving “identity politics” (politics based on a particular identity such as race, religion or gender), constant state intervention, and “the idea that bureaucrats make better decisions than individuals” or elected politicians.

Despite the Tories being in office for 14 years, she argues that increased government regulation and public spending have crippled economic growth and polarized the country.

She rejected Robert Jenrick’s call for key party policies to be sorted out now, saying “the UK system is broken” and needed a reset.

The Conservative Party, she adds, must return to its core values ​​and come up with new policies that recognize this reality.