By james art 
LONDON — Britain’s Conservative Party elected Kemi Badenoch as its new leader on Saturday as it tries to recover from a crushing election defeat that ended 14 years in power.
The first black woman to lead a major British political party, Badenoch (pronounced BADE-enock) defeated rival MP Robert Jerrick in a vote of almost 100,000 members of the centre-right Conservatives.
She received 53,806 votes in the party’s online and mail-in vote to Jerrick’s 41,388.
Badenoch replaces former prime minister Rishi Sunak, who in July led the Conservatives to their worst election result since 1832. The Conservatives lost more than 200 seats, down to 121.
The new leader’s tall order is to try to restore the party’s reputation after years of division, scandal and economic turmoil, hit back at Labor Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s policies on key issues including the economy and immigration, and return the Conservatives to power at the next election , due by 2029
“The task before us is difficult but simple,” Badenoch said in a victory speech to a room full of Conservative MPs, staff and journalists in London. She said the party’s job was to hold the Labor government to account and produce promises and a plan for government.
Speaking about the party election, she said “we have to be honest – honest about the fact that we’ve made mistakes, honest about the fact that we’ve let standards slip”.
“The time has come to speak the truth, stand up for our principles, plan our future, realign our politics and our thinking and give our party and our country the fresh start they deserve,” Badenoch said.
A business secretary in the Sunak government, Badenoch was born in London to Nigerian parents and spent much of her childhood in the West African country.
The 44-year-old former software engineer describes herself as a disruptor, championing a low-tax, free-market economy and vowing to “overdrive, reboot and reprogram” the British state.
A critic of multiculturalism and a self-proclaimed enemy of vigilantism, Badenoch has criticized gender-neutral bathrooms and the government’s plans to reduce carbon emissions in the UK. During the leadership campaign, she drew criticism for saying that “not all cultures are equally valid” and for suggesting that maternity pay was excessive.
Tim Bale, professor of politics at Queen Mary University of London, said the Conservative Party was likely to “pivot to the right on both its economic and social policies” under Badenoch.
He predicted that Badenoch would pursue “what you might call a boats, boilers and bathrooms strategy… focusing a lot on the transgender issue, the immigration issue and skepticism about progress towards net zero”.
Although the Conservative Party is not representative of the country as a whole – its 132,000 members are mostly affluent, older white men – its upper echelons have become significantly more diverse.
Badenoch is the third female Tory leader after Margaret Thatcher and Liz Truss to become Prime Minister. She is the second non-white Conservative leader after Sunak and the first with African roots. In contrast, the centre-left Labor Party has so far only been led by white men.
In a leadership contest that lasted more than three months, conservative lawmakers whittled down the field from six candidates in a series of votes before putting the final two down to the wider party membership.
Both finalists come from the right wing of the party and say they can win back voters from Reform UK, the hard-right, anti-immigrant party led by populist politician Nigel Farage that has eaten away at Conservative support.
But the party has also lost many voters to the winning party, Labor, and to the centrist Liberal Democrats, and some conservatives worry that the right-wing move will alienate the party from public opinion.
Starmer’s government had a difficult first few months in office, beset by negative headlines, fiscal gloom and plummeting approval ratings.
But Bale said historical data suggested there was a chance Badenoch could lead the Conservatives back to power in 2029.
“It is quite unusual for someone to take over when a party is very badly defeated and be able to lead it to an electoral victory,” he said. “However, Keir Starmer did just that after 2019. So records must be broken.”
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