Kemi Badenoch has secured a resounding victory in the Conservative Party leadership contest, making her the first black woman to lead a major political party in the United Kingdom. The 44-year-old former minister triumphed over fellow right-wing candidate Robert Jenrick, 42, by a significant margin of 12,418 votes. She replaces Rishi Sunak, who led the party to a significant defeat in the July general election, resulting in the Conservatives holding a record low of 121 seats in the House of Commons.

In her victory speech, Ms Badenoch expressed her gratitude and outlined her vision to “renew” the party. “Our party is critical to the success of our country,” she said, as per the BBC, adding that it is essential to acknowledge the mistakes made over the last 14 years in government.

Kemi Badenoch delivered a sobering and uncompromising message to her own party on Saturday within minutes of being elected as its new leader, saying the Conservatives had to become “honest” again if they were to stand any chance of recovering as a political force. This is the Badenoch way: blunt and straight to the point. The cheers and whooping had hardly died away at the news that she had defeated Robert Jenrick by 53,806 votes to 41,388 votes before she was laying down the law.

“Our party is critical to the success of country,” she said. “But to be heard, we have to be honest. Honest about the fact that we made mistakes. Honest about the fact that we let standards slip. The time has come to tell the truth.”

Whichever individuals she had in mind – Boris Johnson, Liz Truss, Rishi Sunak or whether it was everyone all together – there could be no repeat. It was time “to reset our politics and our thinking”.

For the first three months after July’s election, British politics had been stuck in a pre-budget phoney war. Government ministers had been unsure what money they would have to spend so couldn’t talk about new policies, while shattered Tories agonised and argued about what kind of leader they wanted next. But over the past four days, two huge and historic moments have finally begun to deliver signs of a “reset” of British politics.

Last Wednesday saw the first budget delivered by a female chancellor of the exchequer, Rachel Reeves. Then on Saturday, 44-year-old Kemi Badenoch, born of Nigerian parents and brought up there, became the first Black politician to be elected as leader of one of the UK’s main political parties.

Both Reeves and Badenoch marked their moments in some style: Reeves with a spectacular high-risk, high-tax and borrowing budget, and Badenoch with a pledge to reimagine “what the Conservative party needs to be over the next five, 10 and 20 years”.

One senior Tory at Saturday’s leadership event in central London said: “We have an intriguing battle in prospect now. Labour has laid out its store in no uncertain terms. Big tax, big spend. Now we under our new leader have to work out how to respond. What kind of party are we? We have to get this right but don’t need to be in any great rush.”

That said, Badenoch has to start making decisions almost immediately. Labour cabinet ministers have been going around after the budget saying, “we have made our choices”, and “we have gone big” with £40bn of tax increases and changes to fiscal rules that allow massive extra borrowing. Now they are challenging the Tories to respond.

In the next fortnight there will be votes in the Commons on Reeves’s blockbuster £25.7bn move to increase employers national insurance contributions. The NI measure requires legislation of its own before it can be implemented. There will also be other votes on changing the fiscal rules to allow the huge sums of extra borrowing, and new inheritance tax arrangements for owners of farms, which the Tories hate.

All require decisions by Badenoch. Will she oppose Labour’s plans to spend on services and invest in infrastructure and if so what is the message that sends? Cabinet minister Pat McFadden, the chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, sees the dividing lines sharply now: “If the Tories want to go round the country opposing every new public investment in schools and hospitals they can be our guests.”

This all moves on from the pre and immediate post-election period when the two parties were both hedging bets. “The budget turns the page on that,” says another cabinet minister. No one in Labour is pretending that everything is set fair or easy now the budget is out of the way. There are worries about growth projections being so low despite all the extra spending.

Reeves stressed to the Observer that reform of services is now the key and that money will on its own not create a better public realm. “Now we have fixed the foundations of our economy I am going for growth and I am going for reform,” she said. “Because we cannot tax and spend our way to prosperity nor can we tax and spend our way to better services. Instead, we need economic growth and we need economic reform.”

But Badenoch will not be allowed much of a honeymoon. This weekend she will begin choosing her shadow cabinet before she holds its first meeting on Tuesday. Already, former foreign secretary James Cleverly, Steve Barclay, former health secretary, and Jeremy Hunt, the former chancellor and foreign secretary, have said they do not want to serve.

Whether Jenrick agrees to do so remains to be seen. Then on Wednesday she will face Keir Starmer for the first time at prime minister’s questions.

Badenoch was congratulated by several of her predecessors, including Sunak, who posted on social media: “I know that she will be a superb leader of our great party” while former prime minister Boris Johnson praised her “courage and clarity” and said she “brings a much needed zing and zap to the Conservative party”.

The prime minister, Sir Keir Starmer, said: “The first Black leader of a Westminster party is a proud moment for our country.” He added: “I look forward to working with you and your party in the interests of the British people.”

The Lib Dem Leader Sir Ed Davey also congratulated Badenoch, saying “the first Black leader of a major UK political party is a historic moment for the country.”

But Davey and his party also see the election of Badenoch as a huge opportunity for the Lib Dems to hold on to the former Tory voters they gained in July. “This leadership contest has shown the Conservative party have abandoned the centre ground of British politics,” Davey said.

Britain’s humbled Conservative Party elected Kemi Badenoch as its new leader on Saturday, turning to a right-wing favorite who has railed against identity politics, transgender rights and state spending to rebuild its reputation after a devastating election defeat.

Badenoch defeated Robert Jenrick in a vote of party members by 53,806 votes to 41,000, after a months-long contest to replace Rishi Sunak as leader. She’s the first black woman to lead a major British political party.

Her selection all but ensures a rightward shift to Britain’s political discourse over the next several years, and creates a jarring stylistic clash between the new opposition leader and Keir Starmer, Labour’s serious and straightlaced prime minister.

Taking the podium, Badenoch said it was “the most enormous honor to be elected” as leader for “the party that has given me so much.” She outlined the tasks ahead to the Tory faithful: Hold the Labour government to account and prepare for government with “a clear plan.” She added that UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer was “discovering all too late the perils of not having such a plan.”

Badenoch continued that the party needed to be honest “about the fact that we made mistakes, honest about the fact that we let standards slip.”

Concluding her remarks, the new Tory leader said: “The time has come to tell the truth, to stand up for our principles, to plan for our future, to reset our politics and our thinking, and to give our party and our country the new start that they deserve. It is time to get down to business. It is time to renew.”

Badenoch, who relishes confrontation and has received muted support from her own lawmakers in her various moves for the leadership, has leant into US-style cultural clashes on a swathe of topics, inspiring grassroots members on the Conservatives’ right-wing in the process.

Her task now is to revive a party still coming to terms with its worst ever election result. The Tories were dumped from government in a July general election, going from 372 to 121 seats in the process, reflecting public anger over their management of the economy, crime, immigration and standards in public life.

Both candidates had insisted that the Tories can return to power at the next election, which will take place in 2029 or earlier. But it will be a tall order for a bloc still tainted by an era that ended in catastrophe, and Badenoch’s own involvement in the failed governments of Liz Truss and Rishi Sunak may prove an impediment.

And while Saturday’s result finally ends an extended period of limbo at the head of the party, it will do nothing to quiet a cacophony of competing voices about where the Conservatives should plant their flag.

The leadership contest was billed as a referendum on the party’s future, and whether it throws its energy towards winning back voters lost to the center or to the right. But the answer was settled when two sparsely tested right-wingers progressed to the final members-only vote, after a divided party exiled every moderate and self-styled unifier from the race. Badenoch, who has been described as difficult to work with by some in the party, won the backing of only 42 Conservative MPs before the vote went to members.

Badenoch and Jenrick made dueling, populist appeals to members during their campaigns, with the latter more robustly promising to focus his attention on regaining right-leaning voters primarily concerned about rising migration to Britain. Neither are particularly well-known to most Britons, though Badenoch achieved greater prominence while a minister, frequently getting dragged into contentious debates with journalists.

Badenoch, a Nigerian-raised former banker, served as minister in the equalities, business, housing and trade departments while the Conservatives were in office. She becomes the fourth female leader of the Conservatives, a dividing line with Labour, which has only been led by men.

Badenoch has defended the actions of the British empire and opposed critical race theory, which she has claimed is becoming commonplace in British institutions like schools and hospital trusts. She sought to change Britain’s equality law to define sex as biological, prompting criticism from trans rights groups.

And during her campaign, she received unwelcome headlines after claiming statutory maternity pay is “excessive” and joking that up to 10% of Britain’s 500,000 civil servants “should be in prison.”

Badenoch was born in Britain and returned to the country as a teenager after stints in Nigeria and the US, briefly working in McDonald’s as a teenager and later training in computer engineering. In an interview with the Spectator in 2022, she said her conservatism developed while at university, as a “reaction to very spoilt, entitled, privileged, the metropolitan elites-in-training” she says she encountered there.

Her compelling background and unapologetic language make her well-placed to work to rebuild the party’s right flank, which collapsed in the wake of failed promises to lower both legal and illegal migration to Britain. The populist Reform UK party, led by career rabble-rouser Nigel Farage, tore into the Conservative vote share in the July election, appealing to lifelong Tory voters who were concerned about arrivals to the country.

But the Tories were decimated on two fronts, and Badenoch has made fewer appeals to the traditional, more affluent and more pro-European Britons who abandoned the party for Labour and the Liberal Democrats, another party circling the Tories in parliament.

Badenoch, who has been described as abrasive by some of those who have worked alongside her, admitted to the BBC this week that she may temper her approach if elected, telling the corporation: “I have to be mindful that I have a higher tolerance for things than others, and I think part of being a leader is being able to calibrate so that you can help manage other people.”

Though an avowed early Brexit supporter, Badenoch has softened her rhetoric towards Europe, drawing a contrast with Jenrick by pledging to collaborate with the European Union. She has not ruled out nor committed to leaving the European Convention on Human Rights, the entente that became a bogeyman among some Conservatives after it prevented government attempts to deport asylum seekers to Rwanda. That has for years been a Rubicon between mainstream Conservatives and their more radical colleagues; a public referendum on the issue would be painful and heated, much as the Brexit vote in 2016 was, and the move would further isolate Britain from Europe at a time when even leading Brexiteers have struggled to articulate the successes of the project.

On policy, however, Badenoch is sure to drag the opposition party to the right. She has championed moves to remove regulation and reduce the size of the state, and she has proudly described her “hard-nosed view on immigration,” writing in the Telegraph in September that not all cultures are “equally valid.”

Labour has been relaxed, both publicly and privately, over the outcome of the race. One Labour lawmaker told CNN this week that “neither will last two years” – but that Badenoch was “marginally more of a threat” than Jenrick because she can “think outside the box on issues.”

Starmer’s first months in power have not been seamless, but Labour’s first Budget, revealed on Wednesday, allowed it to define its economic priorities and further strike a contrast with a Conservative group that most voters still associate with chaos and in-fighting.

Still, Badenoch will take heart from Labour’s tepid support among the public; the party won just a third of voters, but nearly-two thirds of seats, at the election, and Starmer’s approval ratings have quickly dropped since he took power.

Badenoch’s first priority will be to define herself before Labour does. An awkwardly timed leadership contest will be immediately overshadowed by the US presidential election on Tuesday; Badenoch will face off against Starmer in Prime Minister’s Questions for the first time on Wednesday.

CNN’s Lauren Said-Moorhouse contributed reporting.

The sign that Kemi Badenoch, who on November 2nd was elected leader of Britain’s Conservatives, was operating on a different plane from her rivals came at the party’s conference in October. While they busied themselves with cheesy selfies and cheesier merchandise, her team released a 22,000-word pamphlet, entitled “Conservatism in Crisis: Rise of the Bureaucratic Class”. It contained a sprawling theory, which combined Ms Badenoch’s pet issue of combating progressive identity politics with an idea circulating on the Tory right: that the “blob”, a sticky nexus of liberal interest groups, works to thwart the policy of Conservative governments. This “new bureaucratic class”, as Ms Badenoch terms it, comprises private-sector compliance lawyers, human-resources staff, university administrators, NGO workers and green lobbyists. They owe their comfortable middle-class livelihoods to demanding ever more government regulation to enforce, at the expense of the “old middle class” of entrepreneurs. And that regulation is to blame for an astonishing range of Britain’s ailments: low growth, high taxation, high immigration, social polarisation, low-value degrees, a creaking health service and the weakening of the nation-state itself. The new bureaucratic class is, the authors wrote, a “new left, not based primarily on nationalisation and private sector trade unions, but ever increasing social and economic control”. It fell to the Tories to confront them.

But this is not a repeat of the Liz Truss debacle.

But the costs are rising.

Rachel Reeves has raised both borrowing and taxes by historic amounts.

Small sums can have disproportionate effects on the public realm.

Immigrants to the rescue, again.