UK Tories elect first black female leader

Kemi Badenoch has replaced the party’s former leader Rishi Sunak and has promised to win back voters abandoned the Conservatives

Kemi Badenoch has been elected as the new leader of the UK’s Conservatives in a vote on Saturday, replacing Rishi Sunak and becoming the first black woman to lead a major British political party.

Born in the UK and raised in Nigeria, the 44-year-old beat out her opponent MP Robert Jenrick by 12,418 votes, according to the BBC. In her victory speech, Badenoch, who became an MP in 2017 after a career in banking and IT, vowed to renew the party after it suffered its worst defeat in the general election in July.

She also stressed the need to “bring back” voters that have abandoned the Tories, claiming that the party is “critical to the success of our country.”

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Badenoch insisted that, in order to be heard, the party had to be more honest and admit that it has “made mistakes” and “let standards slip” over the past 14 years that it had been in charge of the British government.

The British Labour Party defeated the Conservatives in a historic parliamentary election in July for control of the nation’s government. The Tories suffered their worst-ever election defeat, while Labour’s landslide brought a new party to power for the first time in 14 years.

Like Liz Truss and Boris Johnson before him, Sunak has presided over an historic decline in Britain’s standard of living and a rise in energy costs and inflation, both of which soared after the UK cut itself off from Russian fossil fuels in 2022.