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Robert Jenrick greets Kemi Badenoch, after Badenoch was announced as the new leader of Britain's Conservative Party, in London, Britain, November 2, 2024.
Can Britain’s new Tory leader become Thatcher 2.0?
Self-proclaimed “straight speaker”Kemi Badenoch won the leadership of the UK Conservative Party on Saturday – the first Black woman to do so – and promises to take the party further to the right.
Who is Badenoch? The British-born daughter of Nigerian immigrants, Badenoch champions “migrant patriotism,” rejects “woke” ideologies, and embraces cultural conservatism. She’s pro-Brexit,an admirer of Margaret Thatcher, and campaigned on a platform of freedom and individual responsibility. Badenoch’s got a major task cleaning up after Boris Johnson, Liz Truss, and Rishi Sunak, but she’s aiming high. She says she will defeat Labour and win back voters lost to Nigel Farage’s Reform Party by reasserting core Conservative values.
And while some have criticized her bluntness, Badenoch considers it an asset. At the party’s weekend conference, she declared, “A lot of people are not used to a politician who says it like it is.” Straight talk, indeed.
What could Badenoch bode well for Britain?In a BBC interview on Sunday, Badenoch stated that, if elected, her economic policies would be “completely the opposite” of Chancellor Rachel Reeves’ and would focus on tax cuts. She criticized previous Conservative leaders for their broken promises on immigration and taxes, which damaged voter trust. But she also said Johnson’sPartygate scandal was“overblown” and refused to “churn over” everything that went wrong with previous Tory prime ministers.
We’ll be watching whether her neo-Thatcherite no-nonsense approach unifies or alienates more moderate Tories.