Kemi Badenoch, the 44-year-old member of Parliament for North West Essex, is the new leader of Britain’s Conservative Party, and must now provide a center-right opposition to the Labour government led by Prime Minister Keir Starmer. She won 56.5 percent of the party’s diminished membership to beat fellow former cabinet minister Robert Jenrick to the crown.
Badenoch had been regarded as one of the favorites to succeed former Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, but with such a small party membership (just 130,000), it was difficult to make accurate predictions. But she has been a rising star since 2017, and she placed an impressive fourth in the last leadership contest in 2022. Now she is no longer a rising star — she is risen.
Her most obvious characteristics at first glance are those that she regards as relatively unimportant. Although she is now the fourth woman to lead the Tories, and the second leader from an ethnic minority background, she is the first Black person to be elected to the top of a major political party in Britain. (The Labour Party has only ever been led by white men.)
Olukemi Olufunto Adegoke was born in Wimbledon in south-west London, but her parents, both of Yoruba ancestry, lived in Nigeria. Her late father Femi was a doctor and her mother Feyi a professor of physiology.
Kemi spent her childhood mostly in Lagos, Nigeria’s largest city, though she also traveled extensively in the U.S. where her mother frequently gave lectures. When she was 16, she moved to the United Kingdom as the security situation in Nigeria deteriorated after the military coup of 1993. Living with a family friend, she read computer systems engineering at the University of Sussex and then trained part-time as a lawyer, before working for the private bank Coutts & Co.
Political instincts soon asserted themselves. Having joined the Conservative Party at age 25, she stood unsuccessfully for Parliament in 2010 and for the London Assembly in 2012. Three years later, she inherited a vacancy on the capital’s representative body, but was quickly adopted as Conservative candidate for the safe Essex constituency of Saffron Walden and joined the House of Commons at the general election of June 2017.
In 2012, Kemi Adegoke married an Anglo-Irish Deutsche Bank financier, Hamish Badenoch, also active in Conservative politics. Once she was an MP, her rise was swift: a junior minister from 2019 to 2022, she was promoted to the cabinet as International Trade secretary by Liz Truss and retained by Sunak, then took over the expanded Department for Business and Trade in 2023.
Badenoch has always presented herself as a no-nonsense, right-of-center conservative with a powerful belief in free markets and personal responsibility. Forthright and articulate, she has often been described as “argumentative”; while she is undoubtedly blunt and eager to debate, there is a hint of gender and racial bias.
Trevor Phillips, a former chair of the London Assembly and of the Equality and Human Rights Commission, who comes from a West Indian family, told the Spectator’s TV channel, “The most important thing to understand about Kemi is that she’s Nigerian.” That, he explained, meant that she was combative and expected others to be equally combative in return.
You might think that someone inheriting the leadership of a party in the wake of its worst defeat in its 190-year history, facing an interventionist, big-state Labour government with a huge parliamentary majority, might benefit from being “combative.” Certainly Badenoch faces a daunting task, to rebuild the Conservative Party’s reputation and construct a coherent and popular ideological platform to have any hope of returning to power without a decade or more in opposition (as it did in 1997-2010).
Badenoch is a refreshingly unapologetic conservative with economic beliefs that would have warmed the hearts of Margaret Thatcher or Ronald Reagan. She has proclaimed her belief in “the free market as the fairest way of helping people prosper,” but she has also been unsparing in her analysis of where her own party has compromised the free market.
The free market “has been undermined by a willingness to embrace protectionism for special interests,” she said. “It’s been undermined by retreating in the face of the ‘Ben and Jerry’s’ tendency — those who say a business’s main priority is social justice, not productivity and profit — and it’s been undermined by the actions of crony capitalists.”
Badenoch is unusually interested in ideas. She frequently cites the influence of the venerable Stanford economist Thomas Sowell, and especially his powerful 2000 conservative analysis, “Basic Economics.” She has visible contempt for “woke” ideology and champions “limited government — doing less, but better.”
Many commentators have written Badenoch off as merely the first stage in any Tory revival. Yet there is a tremor, even if only a minor one, a tingle of excitement on the right as a result of her election. She will encounter media storms, because she is frank and does not care if she offends sensibilities or challenges orthodoxy. For some on the left, she is irreconcilable, almost abhorrent, but no politician can win the backing of the whole electorate.
At the same time, voters see Badenoch as honest and committed to her beliefs. There are hints of the historic rise to the Conservative leadership of Thatcher in 1975, and her rejection of the post-World War Two economic and social consensus.
Expect Badenoch to lead a party that is unapologetic about its fundamental principles: free markets, individual liberty, personal responsibility, lower taxation and a smaller state. Only the future will show whether the British electorate wants that vision, but there will be no doubt about what Badenoch offers.
Eliot Wilson is a freelance writer on politics and international affairs and the co-founder of Pivot Point Group. He was senior official in the U.K. House of Commons from 2005 to 2016, including serving as a clerk of the Defence Committee and secretary of the U.K. delegation to the NATO Parliamentary Assembly.
