A British ‘culture warrior’? Kemi Badenoch sets Conservatives on populist path.

Many politicians would shrink from the task that lies ahead of the United Kingdom’s Conservative Party: bouncing back from a historic defeat in the country’s July 2024 general election.

But Kemi Badenoch, the Tories’ newly elected leader, is unafraid of a fight.

The first Black woman to lead a major British political party, Ms. Badenoch is known for a straight-talking, no-nonsense approach that sometimes strays into the combative.

Many Conservatives hope that her energy, as well as her staunch “anti-woke” platform, will rejuvenate the party’s flagging political fortunes – out of power for the first time in 14 years, with a record-low number of seats in Parliament.

Yet others fear that her uncompromising, often Trumpian approach will pull the party further to the right, deepening divides and alienating the centrist voters whom the party hopes to recapture.

A staunchly right-wing worldview

Ms. Badenoch was born in London but grew up in an affluent family in the Nigerian city of Lagos. She lived there until she was 16, when her parents sent her to the U.K. to avoid the increasingly unstable political situation at home. As a teenager, Ms. Badenoch worked at McDonald’s to fund her studies, which earned her a degree in computer systems engineering at the University of Sussex.

Ms. Badenoch has described these experiences as the bedrock of her political worldview – one which is staunchly right-wing. In an interview with the Daily Mail, she described Nigeria as a country where she “never felt safe,” feeding her appreciation for order and security in the U.K.

The politician says her time at college – surrounded by those she described as “stupid, lefty white kids” – also fed her conservative views. “People often ask what made me a Conservative and there was no one thing,” she told The Times of London in one interview. “But part of it was being at Sussex among snotty, middle-class north Londoners.”

Today, Ms. Badenoch is well-known for her vocal stance on what her supporters call “culture war” causes. She has criticized the Black Lives Matter movement, opposed letting people self-identify as transgender, and said that “not all cultures are equally valid” when it comes to deciding who should be allowed into the U.K.

Those positions have fired up hopes among Tories that Ms. Badenoch will win back voters who abandoned the Conservative Party in favor of the populist Reform UK, which enjoyed unprecedented success at the general election by running on an anti-immigration platform.

Others believe that Ms. Badenoch’s bluntness will also play well with voters who are tired of politicians trotting out vague platitudes.

“I think [Ms. Badenoch] is really good at getting her message across in a clear, coherent, and meaningful way,” says Gareth Lyon, a Conservative local councilor in Rushmoor, in southern England, who voted for Ms. Badenoch in the party members’ leadership vote. He says that since Ms. Badenoch’s election, a surge of new members have joined his local party branch.

“She actually reminds me of Ronald Reagan,” says Mr. Lyon. “Something about her is inspiring. Reagan was able to build a coalition, not by pandering, not by trying to make everyone happy, but by starting from what he believed in. That’s what I’ve seen in Kemi.”

This straight-talking approach could backfire. The “culture war” issues that have earned Ms. Badenoch admiration from some voters are bound to alienate others. She is expected to take the party’s policies firmly to the right, a move which could put off more moderate Conservative voters.

But for now, it is a risk that the Conservative Party is willing to take.

Overcoming “immorality and incompetence”

Much will depend on Ms. Badenoch’s next steps. Her leadership bid did not reveal concrete policies, but rather self-described “core principles,” such as personal responsibility, family, and truth.

As a result, Ms. Badenoch has a largely blank slate on which to work. She remains mostly unfamiliar to the electorate: Polling by YouGov in the run-up to the leadership vote found that 43% of Britons simply didn’t know how they felt about her.

Ms. Badenoch may be “straight-talking” – but her impact on the electorate will still depend on the issues and policies she chooses to champion, says Ben Worthy, a lecturer in politics at Birkbeck College, University of London. While Ms. Badenoch has built her reputation on “anti-woke” issues, topics such as trans rights have little traction with voters, he says.

“It could be that she’s going to be ‘straight-talking’ on immigration; there is a segment of voters who are very interested in immigration,” says Dr. Worthy. “But most of these voters are already Conservatives.”

To win back voters, Ms. Badenoch will need to both diagnose and remedy what led the Conservatives to implode at the last general election.

Polling shows that two events in particular damaged the Conservative Party’s reputation, says Dr. Worthy: the Partygate scandal, when then-Prime Minister Boris Johnson held a Downing Street Christmas get-together in violation of COVID-19 pandemic restrictions, and the tenure of Liz Truss, a prime minister best known for unpopular economic policies and being compared to a lettuce.

“It’s a mixture of immorality and incompetence,” says Dr. Worthy.

Her strong moral stances may position Ms. Badenoch well to tackle at least some of these problems. But the road ahead is likely to be long. With just 121 members of Parliament compared with 411 from the ruling Labour Party, the Conservative Party is extremely unlikely to be able to reverse its fortunes in a single term.

Under these circumstances, consistency will be key, rather than simple answers or even fiery rhetoric. Ms. Badenoch must be able to unite rather than divide in a British political scene that is still fractured and unstable. The Conservative Party itself has burned through six leaders in less than a decade.

For now, it is a challenge that Ms. Badenoch’s supporters believe she is more than capable of meeting.

“If you try and be all things to all people, it might work for a short period of time,” says Mr. Lyon. “But people will end up treating you with contempt because you’ll be neither hot or cold, but lukewarm and good for nothing.”