Badenoch Wins UK Tories’ Leadership

Kemi Badenoch, the member of Parliament for North West Sussex, was selected Saturday to lead the United Kingdom’s Conservative Party.

Badenoch, who beat out Robert Jenrick, MP from Newark, will lead the opposition against the government of Labour’s Keir Starmer, who has earned historic disapproval ratings since becoming prime minister in July. 

Badenoch is tasked with a daunting rebuild. The Tories were on the receiving end of a generational blowout in July’s election, losing 200 seats in their worst showing since 1824. The UK’s oldest party, which had been in power for 14 years, lost a large share of its vote to Nigel Farage’s insurgent Reform UK Party, which proposes harder lines on immigration and Euroskepticism than the Conservatives’. 

Badenoch’s skeptics have pointed to her closeness with liberal establishment Tories like Michael Gove and criticized the gap between her “anti-woke” rhetoric and her policy prescriptions.