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Europe|Born in London, Raised in Nigeria, She’s Now Leading Britain’s Conservatives
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/11/05/world/europe/kemi-badenoch-uk-conservative-party.html
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Kemi Badenoch’s ascent is partly the result of a deliberate diversifying of the party under David Cameron in the 2000s. In her politics, she exemplifies its more recent rightward turn.
Nov. 5, 2024Updated 12:27 p.m. ET
Britain’s Conservative Party made history last weekend, becoming the country’s first major party to elect a Black woman as leader.
And yet this milestone was reached not by a party of the progressive center-left but by Britain’s oldest and most traditional conservative political force.
“I’m glad because it shows that my country and my party are actually places where it doesn’t matter who you are or what you look like,” the new leader, Kemi Badenoch, told the BBC on Sunday. After all, the Conservatives have broken glass ceilings before, picking all three of Britain’s female prime ministers, as well as its first leader who wasn’t white, Rishi Sunak.
Now 44, Ms. Badenoch was born in London and raised in Nigeria, returning to Britain when she was 16. In her first parliamentary speech, in 2017, she declared, “To all intents and purposes, I am a first-generation immigrant.”
She will now lead a party that has struck an increasingly harsh tone on immigration, a shift that mirrors her own changed views on the subject.
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