The culture warrior on a mission to rebuild a battered Tory party

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Kemi Badenoch was the runaway favourite at the start of the Conservative party leadership contest this summer — and has emerged as its resolute victor.

The former UK business secretary and Conservative MP for North West Essex took 57 per cent of the members’ vote to beat her rival Robert Jenrick, a former immigration minister, the party announced on Saturday.

She becomes the first Black leader of a UK political party, but is a culture warrior who rejects identity politics and crusades against “woke” ideology.

A staunch rightwinger, she is a “net zero sceptic” who used her previous position as equalities minister to challenge views around the rights of transgender people.

Now she has vowed to rebuild the party from first principles following its worst-ever defeat in July’s general election.

Badenoch’s combative style sometimes risks tipping into rudeness, with even her allies conceding she could start a fight in an empty room. She admits she is “blunt” and forthright, but insists she battles on behalf of Tories — not with them.

Nonetheless, she had indicated she would soften her overall approach if she became leader.

Her supporters believe her tough-talking style will see her land blows against her milder-mannered opponent Sir Keir Starmer during the weekly showdown between the pair at Prime Minister’s Questions in the House of Commons.

Some Labour insiders also worry that Starmer will cut a “pale, male and stale” figure against Badenoch, a charismatic Black woman.

It is also wounding to Labour, which likes to think of itself as the party of diversity, that the Tories have achieved another cultural milestone: electing the first Black leader, as well as having notched up the first female and first British Asian prime ministers.

Unlike her rival Jenrick, who set out a detailed suite of policies, Badenoch declined to commit herself to many specific pledges during the race. 

She said that if she took the helm of the party she would take time to draw up a considered prospectus for government and would assemble a broad team to do so. 

Instead of policies, she campaigned on the values she said would underpin her leadership: personal responsibility, family, truth, citizenship and equality before the law.

That said, some clues about her plans were to be found in a pamphlet she published during the party’s annual conference in Birmingham on the “rise of the bureaucratic class”.

Her contention is that this ballooning group, whose members inhabit roles linked to the state, is socially intolerant and driving an economic slowdown.

During the four-day party gathering last month, Badenoch committed a litany of gaffes — from branding maternity pay “excessive” and suggesting the minimum wage was too burdensome on businesses, to joking that 10 per cent of civil servants should be in prison.

She managed to bounce back from the comments, but her critics fret that such outbursts risk derailing her leadership. 

Her close allies in the parliamentary party include former housing minister Lee Rowley, former Cabinet Office minister Alex Burghart and ex-data minister Julia Lopez — all of whom are expected to play prominent roles in her team.

Her “renewal 2030” campaign won the backing of other high-profile rising stars in the parliamentary party, including former energy secretary Claire Coutinho, former Treasury chief secretary Laura Trott and ex-innovation minister Andrew Griffith.

Party grandees endorsed her, too, including ex-housing secretary and mentor Michael Gove, ex-chancellor George Osborne and former Tory leader Lord William Hague. Across the Atlantic, Republican Florida Governor Ron DeSantis said she was an inspiration for conservatives “across the world”. 

Born in the UK, Badenoch grew up in a middle class family in Nigeria before returning to Britain as a teenager. She said she “became working class” after securing a job at McDonald’s while studying for her A-levels. 

She went on to read engineering at Sussex University before working for the private bank Coutts and then in a digital role at The Spectator magazine.

Badenoch became a member of the London Assembly in 2015, before arriving in parliament two years later. Former prime minister Liz Truss gave Badenoch her first big break in the cabinet as international trade secretary before Rishi Sunak made her business secretary. 

One of the most striking controversies of her career was her widely reported hacking of Labour politician Harriet Harman’s website. Badenoch has insisted that at the time of the incident, 10 years before she became an MP, it was akin in law to getting a “speeding ticket”. 

“It was very amusing at the time. Now that I’m an MP, it’s a lot less amusing,” she told Sky News this week. 

This was her second time running for the leadership after she launched a bid when Boris Johnson resigned in 2022, coming fourth. 

She has two daughters and a son with her husband Hamish, who works for Deutsche Bank.