HARD-RIGHT shadows lengthened over British politics with the election of culture warrior Kemi Badenoch as Tory leader at the weekend.

Ms Badenoch beat rival Robert Jenrick by 53,806 votes to 41,388 from the shrivelled Conservative membership, less than 73 per cent of whom bothered to vote.

The former business secretary becomes the first black woman to lead a major political party in Britain, a fact she does not make much of.

She inherits the Tory leadership from Rishi Sunak following a Tory election defeat of historic dimensions. Nevertheless, the ineptitude of the Labour government has encouraged hopes in the party of a swift return to office.

The Conservatives are now neck-and-neck with Labour in most polls, with the Farageist Reform party also surging, meaning the two hard-right parties are laying claim to nearly half the electorate between them: quite an indictment of the Starmer administration.

Ms Badenoch is known as an abrasive operator who puts speaking her mind, whatever may be in it, before winning friends. 

During the leadership race she called for the jailing of 10 per cent of civil servants, queried the value of maternity pay, dismissed autism as a health issue and suggested migrants should be vetted over their attitude to Israel.

She pledged to “start with principles, not just throwing out policies,” having won the contest without making many specific commitments, at least serious ones.

Her first order of business will be to start appointing her shadow cabinet from among the diminished Conservative parliamentary party, promising, as all new leaders do, to “unite the party.”

She said: “I have to bring in people from all parts of the party and it isn’t just about appealing to voters.

“That is important, but it’s also about making sure that we have a shadow cabinet that is meritocratic, that brings in a diversity of experience, geographic diversity, background, the sort of work experience, professional experience, that MPs had before they came in.”

Unity may prove a challenge — only a third of the party’s MPs voted for her in the earlier stages of the contest and she was backed by less than half of the membership.

Doubtless many centre-ground Tories sat out the vote after the MPs forwarded just two right-wing candidates for their final choice, having eliminated all “one nation” challengers.

The election revealed that there were just 131,680 Tory members eligible to vote, confirming the inexorable erosion of the party’s mass base, which numbered more than three million people in the 1960s.

Nevertheless, Ms Badenoch is the fourth woman and the second ethnic minority leader of the Tories, which rather puts UK Labour to shame: it has always been led by a white man.