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London, United Kingdom
Right-wing candidates Kemi Badenoch and Robert Jenrick won through Wednesday to the final round of the contest to become leader of Britain's opposition Conservative Party -- seeking its sixth chief since the Brexit referendum of 2016.
The outspoken Badenoch received 42 votes from fellow Tory MPs while Jenrick picked up 41. Ex-foreign minister James Cleverly was surprisingly eliminated with 37 votes.
Conservative party members will now select the winner in a ballot that closes at the end of October, with the next leader announced on November 2.
The winner will have to reunite a fractious party, hurting from a brutal election defeat in July when it returned just 121 MPs -- the lowest number in its history. It also lost support to the hard-right Reform UK, led by Nigel Farage.
Also read: Ex-interior minister Priti Patel eliminated from UK Conservative leadership race
The Conservatives face a daunting rebuilding campaign to overturn Labour's 174-seat parliamentary majority at the next election, likely in five years.
But with British elections typically won from the centre, any lurch to the right could scupper that chance.
Badenoch
The British-Nigerian Badenoch is a right-wing firebrand, unafraid to speak her mind and not shy of picking a battle in the culture wars.
Badenoch, 44, has been an MP since 2017, representing an area in the southeastern English county of Essex.
Born in London to Nigerian parents, Badenoch spent much of her childhood in Lagos before returning to the UK aged 16.
She worked in IT and banking before launching into politics, rising to become a business minister in Rishi Sunak's government.
A self-described "sceptic" of net-zero carbon emissions, Badenoch is popular amongst Tory members who tend to be further right than many lawmakers.
She sparked a storm during the leadership contest when she suggested that statutory maternity pay on small businesses was "excessive".
Badenoch lashed out at the finance ministry, blaming it for a rise in immigration during the Conservatives' time in power from 2010.
She sparked a further furor when she joked that up to 10 per cent of Britain's half a million civil servants were so bad that they "should be in prison".
Badenoch, who says she grew up middle-class but "became working class... working in McDonald's", has promised to make Labour "wriggle" and "sweat" if elected leader.
"I will always fight against left-wing nonsense," she told the Conservatives' recent annual conference.
Jenrick
Jenrick, 42, was once considered so mild-mannered and middle-of-the-road that he was referred to in UK political circles as Robert "Generic".
In recent months the decade-long MP has been on a political journey rightwards, prompting some commentators to question his real views.
Jenrick resigned as immigration minister last December saying Sunak's plan to send undocumented migrants to Rwanda did not go far enough.
Watch | Who will replace Rishi Sunak as Tory leader?
He has called for Britain to withdraw from the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR), claiming it made it "impossible to secure" UK borders.
In July last year, media reported that Jenrick had told staff to paint over murals depicting cartoons at an asylum centre because they were too welcoming for children.
Jenrick has put some of his recent weight loss down to the drug Ozempic and told the Tory conference he gave one of his three daughters the middle name Thatcher after the Conservative icon Margaret Thatcher.
"The leadership contest has come down to a three-week fight between two Thatcherite culture warriors, both of whom are in denial about why the party lost the election," Tim Bale, politics professor at Queen Mary University of London, told AFP.
"Badenoch is seen by right-wingers as the real deal, a politician who is genuinely obsessed with combatting what they see as 'wokery' in all its forms, said Bale, who wrote a book on the Tories since Brexit.
"Jenrick attracts more suspicion because he's shape-shifted from a standard issue, centre-right careerist into a hard-liner - so much so that he often appears, as was the case in his speech to the Tory conference in Birmingham, to be trying too hard."
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