Kemi Badenoch the first Black British African female elected to be leader of the Conservative Party forms her first shadow cabinet ahead of elections in 2029
New British Conservative Party leader Kemi Badenoch has put together her top team, Monday, just days after she becoming leader of the opposition.
Badenoch’s first major appointment was former Tory minister Laura Trott who will now serve as shadow education secretary.
Robert Jenrick, who ran the closest race to Badenoch in the Tory leadership contest, accepted the role of shadow justice secretary.
Kemi Badenoch is congratulated by her husband, Hamish Badenoch, after being announced as the new Conservative Party leader following the vote by party members on Saturday, November 2, 2024 [Stefan Rousseau/PA Images via Getty Images]
Mel Stride has been appointed shadow chancellor while Dame Priti Patel was made shadow foreign secretary.
All three ran as candidates against Ms Badenoch in the race to succeed Rishi Sunak. The appointments to the opposition frontbench are an effort to unite different factions of the Conservative Party after a long internal election battle.
She also appointed Nigel Huddleston and Lord Dominic Johnson as joint chairmen of the Conservative party.
Left to right, shadow foreign secretary Dame Priti Patel, shadow chancellor Mel Stride, shadow education secretary Laura Trott, and shadow justice secretary Robert Jenrick.Credit: PA
It was reported on Sunday that Essex MP Dame Rebecca Harris would become the party’s new chief whip.
The full list of appointments is being announced in the run-up to the first shadow cabinet meeting scheduled for Tuesday.
The new Conservative leader insisted she would offer all her rivals in the race roles in her shadow cabinet, but former Home Secretary James Cleverly has already ruled himself out from such a job.
Born in the UK and raised in Nigeria and the US, the 44-year-old beat leadership rival MP Robert Jenrick by 12,418 votes, according to the state broadcaster the BBC.
Describing herself as a “first-generation immigrant”, she went on to cite her political heroes as the UK’s wartime leader, Winston Churchill, the Conservative politician Airey Neave, who was assassinated by the Irish Republican Army (IRA) in 1979, and the equally combative earlier Tory leader, Margaret Thatcher.
Badenoch’s comments about Nigeria – a country in which, she told the UK’s Daily Mail newspaper in mid-October, she had never felt safe, telling reporters that she had carried a machete to school out of fear of violence – drew fierce criticism from her childhood home.
Her comments drew an angry response on X, formerly Twitter, from Nigeria’s former Minister for Aviation Femi Fani-Kayode, who branded Badenoch a “stupid little girl”.
In her victory speech, Badenoch, who became an MP in 2017 after a career in banking and IT, vowed to renew the party after it suffered its worst defeat in the general election in July.
She has stressed the need to “bring back” voters that have abandoned the Tories, claiming that the party is “critical to the success of our country.”
Badenoch insisted that, in order to be heard, the party had to be more honest and admit that it has “made mistakes” and “let standards slip” over the past 14 years in government.
The Conservatives suffered their worst-ever election defeat in July, bringing the Labour Party to power for the first time in 14 years.
Like Liz Truss and Boris Johnson before him, Sunak presided over an historic decline in Britain’s standard of living, coupled with a rise in energy costs and rampant inflation, which soared after the UK cut itself off from Russian fossil fuels in 2022.
Source X/ITV/RT/AP