Most Tory MPs privately admit that electing Kemi Badenoch is a risk – even those who openly supported her. They know of his reputation for starting fights in empty rooms and his “direct” approach to social interactions, which is often mistaken for arrogance and rudeness.

But they also see her qualities: outspoken, fearless and grounded in her belief system in a way that reminds many of Margaret Thatcher.

This is ultimately what gave him the advantage over his opponent, Robert Jenrick, when the vote came down to the party base.

Mr. Jenrick ran the best campaign, but ultimately could not shake his reputation as “Robert Generic,” an identitarian, conservative white man. Like Rishi Sunak, his rags-to-riches story was one in which later riches – he is a lawyer married to an older and even more successful lawyer – obscured the rags.

Ms Badenoch was born in a private Catholic maternity hospital in Wimbledon and grew up in Nigeria where her father was a GP and her mother a lecturer in physiology. Her British passport allowed her to leave the country when the economy collapsed in the 1990s: her parents sent her, at the age of 16, to live with a family friend in Morden, in the South London, where she enrolled at a local university to take her A-levels.

Conservative Party leader Kemi Badenoch pictured in Nigeria with her grandfather at the age of seven.

Kemi Badenoch gives a speech after becoming the new leader of the Conservative Party after beating Robert Jenrick

During the leadership race, she said this was the period in which she “became a worker” – having been born into a middle-class family – by taking a job at McDonald’s. She said: “There’s a humility about it… you had to wash toilets, you had to flip burgers, you had to manage money.”

Ms Badenoch, who spoke English as a second language after Yoruba and considers herself “a first generation immigrant”, says her studies in computer engineering at the University of Sussex led her to Conservative politics.

Surrounded by left-wing students whom she described as “snotty, middle-class people from north London who couldn’t get into Oxbridge”, she said she was appalled by the “high-minded” way they talked about Africa.

She said: “Those stupid left-wing white kids didn’t know what they were talking about. This instinctively made me think, “These are not my people.”

After stints as a software engineer and associate director at Coutts bank, her breakthrough came when she was appointed digital director at The Spectator magazine. There she was championed by then-editor Fraser Nelson and fell under the sway of Michael Gove – who has just supplanted Mr Nelson as editor-in-chief.

Mr Gove and his friend Dougie Smith, the mysterious Tory fixer, had quickly identified Ms Badenoch as a future party leader and encouraged her to adopt the anti-woke beliefs which resonated so strongly with Tory members.

She entered Parliament in 2017 in the safe Conservative seat of Saffron Walden, immediately aligning herself with the Brexiteer wing of the party as Theresa May waged her never-ending battle with the EU to reach a deal: in her inaugural speech , she described the Brexit vote as “the greatest vote of confidence ever given to the United Kingdom project” and won a prominent place on the executive of the 1922 Conservative backbench committee.

Boris Johnson gave him his first government role, as junior minister for children and families, when he became Prime Minister in 2019.

New leader of Britain’s main opposition Conservative Party, Kemi Badenoch smiles alongside her husband Hamish

Kemi Badenoch shakes the hand of her rival Robert Jenrick and congratulates him on winning the Conservative leadership race.

Kemi Badenoch made history as the first black leader of a major British party

His tenure as Equalities Minister gave him a platform to attack identity politics, confronting civil servants over his insistence that public buildings have separate toilets for men and women and complaining about how her three mixed-race children with her banker husband, Hamish Badenoch, are considered black only. She also made headlines by openly defending the controversial Sewell Report, commissioned in the wake of the Black Lives Matter protests, which concluded that the UK was not institutionally racist.

She lost to Liz Truss in the race to succeed Mr Johnson as head of government, but entered the Cabinet as international trade secretary – a post she retained under Mr Sunak.

Ms Badenoch embraces her reputation as confrontational, saying last week: “I’m a very direct person. I’m very outspoken and I’m also very confident. I’m not a wallflower.

When Doctor Who actor David Tennant told an awards ceremony that he would like to wake up to a world where she “no longer exists” and wished she would “shut up”, Ms Badenoch said she would not allow herself to be silenced by a “rich guy”. , a white, left-handed male celebrity attacking “the only black woman in government.”

Yesterday, Mr Johnson gave his immediate and powerful support for her leadership, saying it would bring “a much-needed zap and zap to the Conservative Party”.

But it also brings blunders – that’s why it represents a risk. In the space of a few days, at the Conservative Party conference in Birmingham at the start of the campaign, she managed to declare that maternity pay was “excessive” and said that some civil servants were so bad that 10 per hundred of them should be removed. in prison.

Conservative members have calculated that the risks of his election are outweighed by the rewards: his ability to neutralize the appeal of Nigel Farage’s Reform UK party and sideline the open-ended goals presented by Sir Keir Starmer’s bungling administration.