LONDON — Britain’s opposition Conservatives will choose one of two figureheads of the party’s right, Robert Jenrick or Kemi Badenoch, to be their next leader as the party tries to rebound from a crushing election defeat.
The two candidates will face the verdict of party members after a more centrist rival, former Foreign Secretary James Cleverly, was dramatically knocked out of the leadership contest in a tight vote by lawmakers on Wednesday.
Badenoch, a former business secretary, received 42 of the 120 votes cast in a ballot of Tory lawmakers, while former immigration minister Jenrick got 41. Cleverly was eliminated after receiving 37 votes. The result was a shock — Cleverly came first in the penultimate voting round on Tuesday and had been considered likely to make the runoff.
Lawmakers have whittled the field down from six contenders in four rounds of voting. Tens of thousands of party members across the country will vote at the end of this month, and the winner will be announced on Nov. 2.
Badenoch and Jenrick both idolize Conservative icon Margaret Thatcher, whose free-market policies transformed the United Kingdom during the 1980s. Badenoch often cites the late leader as her inspiration, while Jenrick gave his daughter “Thatcher” as a middle name.
Both say they can win voters back from Reform U.K., the hard-right, anti-immigrant party led by populist politician Nigel Farage. Though Reform won only five House of Commons seats, out of 650, in Britain’s July election, it came second in many more, and its rapid rise has scared many Conservatives to the right.
Trained as a lawyer, Jenrick, 42, is a former moderate who opposed Brexit in Britain’s 2016 referendum on European Union membership but has become more sharply nationalist. He wants to take Britain out of the European Court of Human Rights, scrap the U.K.’s own Human Rights Act, end mass migration, abolish carbon-emissions targets and “stand for our nation and our culture, our identity and our way of life.”
Badenoch, 44, was born in London to Nigerian parents and partly raised in the West African country, and would be the first Black leader of a major British political party.
A former software engineer, she depicts herself as a disruptor, arguing for a low-tax, free-market economy and pledging to “rewire, reboot and reprogram” the British state. A critic of multiculturalism and self-proclaimed enemy of wokeness, Badenoch recently said that “not all cultures are equally valid.”
The winner will lead a right-of-center party that suffered a drubbing in July at the hands of the Labour Party led by Prime Minister Keir Starmer. The Conservatives lost more than 200 seats, taking their tally down to 121 — the party’s worst election result since 1832.
The winner’s tough task is to try to restore the party’s reputation After years of division, scandal and economic tumult, and return the Conservatives to power at the next election, due by 2029.
Some worry that choosing either Badenoch or Jenrick would lead the party away from public opinion.
Theresa May, a former Conservative prime minister, warned last month: “Elections in the U.K. are won on the center ground, and we abandon that ground at our peril.”