Kemi Badenoch has be crowned as the new Conservative Party leader on Saturday, as the four-month-long race to replace Rishi Sunak reached the finish line.
The result of the leadership ballot was announced late in the morning, with the members’ ballot having closed on Thursday.
Ms Badenoch will be at the helm as the party looks to recover from the July election result which saw it return just 121 MPs.
Tory MPs baffled everyone by picking two darlings of the party’s right to go head-to-head, despite previous frontrunner James Cleverly’s plea for them to “be more normal”.
(Image: PA Wire)
After the close of polls on Thursday, both candidates thanked their backers for their support through the contest.
Ms Badenoch described the party as a “family” and said that it is “much more to me than a membership organisation”.
Her rival Rob Jenrick also called for the party to “move past the drama” of recent years and “unite”. “Together we can put an end to the excuses, move past the drama, and unite our party,” he wrote on X.
Immigration, the economy, and how the Conservatives can rebuild trust with the electorate and win back voters they lost at the election have all been discussed at length through the campaign.
(Image: PA Wire)
The party lost seats to Labour, the Liberal Democrats and Reform UK in the July poll.
Dame Priti Patel, Mel Stride, Tom Tugendhat and James Cleverly spent the summer campaigning alongside Mr Jenrick and Ms Badenoch after they put their names forward in the nominations at the end of July.
Dame Priti and Mr Stride were the first two contenders to be eliminated in September, leaving four by the time the party gathered in Birmingham for its autumn conference at the end of the month.
Ms Badenoch ended up asserting her support for maternity pay after comments caused a controversy.
At the start of the campaign, Ms Badenoch wrote in The Telegraph that the party “need to get back to first principles” and has been light on the details of specific policies she would enact.