The UK’s Conservative party will on Saturday announce its new leader, who faces the daunting task of reuniting a divided and weakened party emphatically ousted from power in July after 14 years in charge.
“Anti-woke” candidate Kemi Badenoch is the favourite to win the vote by party members and replace former prime minister Rishi Sunak. He announced his departure as party leader after presiding over the resounding general election defeat on July 5.
According to recent polls, Robert Jenrick is trailing 44-year-old Badenoch in the two-horse contest. The contest’s voting period concluded on Thursday.
At 11 a.m., the victor will be declared the formal leader of the opposition and will take on Keir Starmer of Labour in the House of Commons every Wednesday at the customary Prime Minister’s Questions.
Following the party’s dismal election performance, they will be leading a significantly smaller group of Tory MPs in the chamber.
The new leader must 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.
Both candidates ran on right-wing platforms, which suggested that the Tory parliamentarians, many of whom are centrists, would face challenges in the future.
Badenoch, born in London to Nigerian parents and raised in Lagos, has called for a return to conservative values, accusing her party of having become increasingly liberal on societal issues such as gender identity.She said it “talked right, but governed left”.
According to Blue Ambition, a biography written by Conservative peer Michael Ashcroft, Badenoch became “radicalised” into right-wing politics while at university in the UK.
He described her view of student activists there as the “spoiled, entitled, privileged metropolitan elite-in-training”.
