Fight on the right to be next Tory leader of UK opposition

Rank-and-file party members will now select a winner in a ballot that closes at the end of October, with the next leader announced on November 2.

Kemi Badenoch received 42 votes from fellow Tory MPs while Robert Jenrick picked up 41 on Wednesday. Pictures: AFP

Right-wing candidates Kemi Badenoch and Robert Jenrick have won through to the final round of the contest to become leader of Britain’s opposition Conservative Party, which is seeking its sixth chief since the Brexit referendum of 2016.

The outspoken Ms Badenoch received 42 votes from fellow Tory MPs while Mr Jenrick picked up 41 on Wednesday.

Former foreign minister James Cleverly was surprisingly elimin­ated with 37 votes.

Conservative party members will now select a winner in a ballot that closes at the end of October, with the next leader announced on November 2.

The victor will have to reunite a fractious party, hurting from a brutal election defeat in July when it returned just 121 MPs – the lowest number in its history.

It also lost support to hard-right Reform UK, led by Nigel Farage.

The Conservatives face a daunting rebuilding campaign to overturn Labour’s 174-seat parliamentary majority at the next election, likely in five years.

Yet with British elections typically won from the centre, any lurch to the right could scupper that chance.

The British-Nigerian Badenoch is a right-wing firebrand, unafraid to speak her mind and not shy of picking a battle in the culture wars. Ms Badenoch, 44, has been an MP since 2017, representing an area in the southeastern English county of Essex. Born in London to Nigerian parents, Ms Badenoch spent much of her childhood in Lagos before returning to Britain aged 16. She worked in IT and banking before launching into politics, rising to become a business minister in Rishi Sunak’s government.

A self-described “sceptic” of net-zero carbon emissions, Ms Badenoch is popular among Tory members who tend to be further right than many MPs.

She sparked a storm during the leadership contest when she suggested statutory maternity pay on small businesses was “excessive”.

Ms Badenoch lashed out at the finance ministry, blaming it for a rise in immigration during the Conservatives’ time in power from 2010. And she sparked further furore when she joked that up to 10 per cent of Britain’s half a million civil servants were so bad they “should be in prison”.

Ms Badenoch, who says she grew up middle-class but “became working class ... working in McDonald’s”, has promised to make Labour “wriggle” and “sweat” if elected leader. “I will always fight against left-wing nonsense,” she told the Conservatives’ recent annual conference.

Mr Jenrick, 42, was once considered so mild-mannered and middle-of-the-road that he was referred to in UK political circles as Robert “Generic”. In recent months the decade-long MP has been on a political journey rightwards, prompting some commentators to question his real views.

Mr Jenrick resigned as immigration minister in December saying Mr Sunak’s plan to send undocumented migrants to Rwanda did not go far enough.

He has called for Britain to withdraw from the European Convention on Human Rights, claiming it made it “impossible to secure” Britain’s borders. In July last year, media reported Mr Jenrick had told staff to paint over murals depicting cartoons at an asylum centre because they were too welcoming for children.

Mr Jenrick has put some of his recent weight loss down to the drug Ozempic and told the Tory conference he gave one of his three daughters the middle name Thatcher after Conservative icon Margaret Thatcher.

“The leadership contest has come down to a three-week fight between two Thatcherite culture warriors, both of whom are in denial about why the party lost the election,” said Tim Bale, politics professor at Queen Mary University of London.

“Badenoch is seen by right-wingers as the real-deal – a politician genuinely obsessed with combatting what they see as ‘wokery’ in all its forms,” he said. “Jenrick attracts more suspicion because he’s shape-shifted from a … centre-right careerist into a hard-liner – so much so he often appears … to be trying too hard.”

AFP