Kemi Badenoch, the 44-year-old member of Parliament for North West Essex, is the new leader of Britain’s Conservative Party, and must now provide a center-right opposition to the Labour government led by Prime Minister Keir Starmer. She won 56.5 percent of the party’s diminished membership to beat fellow former cabinet minister Robert Jenrick to the crown.

Badenoch had been regarded as one of the favorites to succeed former Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, but with such a small party membership (just 130,000), it was difficult to make accurate predictions. But she has been a rising star since 2017, and she placed an impressive fourth in the last leadership contest in 2022. Now she is no longer a rising star — she is risen.

Her most obvious characteristics at first glance are those that she regards as relatively unimportant. Although she is now the fourth woman to lead the Tories, and the second leader from an ethnic minority background, she is the first Black person to be elected to the top of a major political party in Britain. (The Labour Party has only ever been led by white men.)

Olukemi Olufunto Adegoke was born in Wimbledon in south-west London, but her parents, both of Yoruba ancestry, lived in Nigeria. Her late father Femi was a doctor and her mother Feyi a professor of physiology.

Kemi spent her childhood mostly in Lagos, Nigeria’s largest city, though she also traveled extensively in the U.S. where her mother frequently gave lectures. When she was 16, she moved to the United Kingdom as the security situation in Nigeria........

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