Former UK secretary of state for international trade Kemi Badenoch on Saturday won the vote to become the UK Conservatives’ new leader.
She replaces Rishi Sunak who quit after the party’s poor showing 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 said that becoming party leader was an “enormous honour”, but that “the task that stands before us is tough”.
“We have to be honest about the fact we made mistakes” and “let standards slip,” she said.
“It is time to get down to business, it is time to renew,” she added.
Badenoch 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.
She becomes the official leader of the opposition and will 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.
Badenoch will be expected to plot a strategy to regain public trust while stemming the flow of support to the right-wing Reform UK party, led by Brexit figurehead Nigel Farage.
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.
She was born in London to Nigerian parents and raised in Lagos.
In July 2022, she said she left Nigeria in search of a better life after she saw how politicians in Africa’s most populous country fail to serve the public.
“I’m ambitious for our party and our country. I chose to become a conservative MP to serve and I chose this country because here, I can be free and I can be everything that I wanted to be.
“I grew up in Nigeria and I saw firsthand when politicians are in it for themselves. When they use private money as their piggybanks, when they promise the earth and they pollute not just the earth but the whole political atmosphere with their failure to serve others,” she said while campaigning to be UK prime minister.
