The UK's struggling Conservatives announced Saturday that they have made a historic decision in electing the daughter of Nigerian immigrants to lead their party back to power. Kemi Badenoch received votes from 53,806 party members, NBC News reports, to Robert Jenrick's 41,388. Both are members of Parliament with Cabinet experience. She succeeds Rishi Sunak, the prime minister who lead the Conservative Party to a resounding defeat in the July elections. For the party to rebound, she said after her victory, per the AP, "we have to be honest—honest about the fact that we made mistakes, honest about the fact that we let standards slip."
Badenoch, 44, is the first Black woman to head a major British political party; three women have had the job. Sunak was the nation's nonwhite prime minister. She faces a long road to winning that job, per the New York Times. The Labour Party now has a huge majority in Parliament, and the Tories will be the opposition party for at least four years before the nation is due for another election. Badenoch promises to rebuild her party on a more authentically conservative base, calling on her training as a computer engineer that she said taught her how to fix problems.
"I grew up somewhere where the lights didn't come on, where we ran out of fuel frequently despite being an oil-producing country," Badenoch told the BBC. She was born in London but spent much of her childhood in Africa, per the AP. At 16, she returned to the UK from the chaos in Nigeria. Badenoch worked part time at McDonald's during school. After receiving a degree in computer systems engineering, she got a law degree, then worked in financial services. "I don't take what we have in this country for granted," Badenoch said. "I meet a lot of people who assume that things are good here because things are good here and they always will be. They don't realize just how much work and sacrifice was required in order to get that." (More United Kingdom stories.)
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