Britain’s Conservative Party made history last weekend, becoming the country’s first major party to elect a Black woman as leader. And yet this milestone was reached not by a party of the progressive center-left but by Britain’s oldest and most traditional conservative political force. After all, the Conservatives have broken glass ceilings before, picking all three of Britain’s female prime ministers, as well as its first leader who wasn’t white, Rishi Sunak. Now 44, Ms. Badenoch was born in London and raised in Nigeria, returning to Britain when she was 16. In her first parliamentary speech, in 2017, she declared, “To all intents and purposes, I am a first-generation immigrant.”
