Voting closes in contest to lead UK Conservative Party as it seeks to rebound from defeat

LONDON -- Voting closed Thursday in the months-long contest to lead Britain’s Conservative Party after its crushing election defeat, with the result due to be announced on Saturday.

Tens of thousands of members of the right-of-center party were eligible to vote in the runoff between lawmakers Kemi Badenoch and Robert Jenrick.

In a race that has lasted more than three months, Conservative lawmakers reduced the field from six candidates in a series of votes before putting the final two to the wider party membership.

Both candidates say they think the contest is close, but no reliable polling is available. The party does not regularly disclose how many members it has, though the figure was about 172,000 in 2022, disproportionately affluent, older white men.

The party is choosing a leader to replace former Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, who in July led the Conservatives to their worst election result since 1832. The Conservatives lost more than 200 seats, taking their tally down to 121.

The winner’s daunting task will be to try to restore the party’s reputation after years of division, scandal and economic tumult, hammer Labour Prime Minister Keir Starmer's policies on key issues including the economy and immigration, and return the Conservatives to power at the next election, due by 2029.

Badenoch, 44, was born in London to Nigerian parents and would be the first Black woman to lead 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.”

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 Convention on 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.”

Jenrick and Badenoch both come from the right of the party and say they can win voters back from Reform U.K., the hard-right, anti-immigrant party led by populist politician Nigel Farage that has eaten away at Conservative support.

But the party also lost many voters to the winning party, Labour, and the centrist Liberal Democrats, and some Conservatives worry that tacking right will lead the party away from public opinion.

The party’s last contested leadership selection, when it was in power in mid-2022, saw members choose Liz Truss over Sunak. Truss resigned as prime minister after just 49 days in office when her tax-cutting plans rocked the financial markets and battered the value of the pound. The party then picked Sunak to replace her.