Kemi Badenoch has hit out at Conservative plotters for “stirring” by suggesting she could replace Rishi Sunak, saying prime ministers “cannot be treated as disposable”.
The business secretary, who consistently comes out as the favourite cabinet minister in polls of Tory members, said it would be wrong to get rid of Sunak on the basis of unpopularity or poor polling.
Asked on Sky’s Sunday Morning with Trevor Phillips programme about reports of Tory MPs seeking to replaced Sunak as leader and those calling for her to be his replacement, she said: “They need to stop messing around and get behind the leader.
“The fact of the matter is most people in the country are not interested in all of this Westminster tittle-tattle. Quite frankly, the people who keep putting my name in there are not my friends. They don’t care about me. They don’t care about my family or what this would entail. They are just stirring.
“We have 350 MPs, this is a small number of people who are doing this. The vast majority of Conservative MPs support the prime minister.”
Badenoch said her own popularity with Conservative members was irrelevant. “This is not a popularity contest. This is about running the country. We can’t just keep treating prime ministers as if they are disposable. ‘Oh, the polls aren’t doing so well, so let’s toss someone else and find another person’ – that’s quite wrong.”
She added: “We should not be trying to drag out prime ministers on the basis of a popularity contest and polling on websites.”
She later told the BBC’s Sunday with Laura Kuenssberg there was too much focus on personality in politics. “If we stick with [Sunak’s] plan we will be able to solve all the problems that people are worried about,” she said.
When asked about the former cabinet minister Simon Clarke, who this week called for Sunak to resign, Badenoch said he should have aired his opinions privately within the Conservative party.
She said she was “extremely frustrated” by the plotting of those trying to get rid of Sunak. Asked whether she denied having anything to do with the plotting, Badenoch said: “Apart from calling Simon to tell him to stop what he was doing, absolutely. It’s all anonymous briefings. Who are these people? My friends would never do that.”
Asked whether she still had ambitions to lead the party, the cabinet minister did not rule out another run at the top job, saying: “You never really know until you are in the moment”.
Senior Conservative figures have been scrambling to figure out who is behind plotting against Sunak, after a mysterious group called the Conservative Britain Alliance funded a £40,000 poll, fronted by the Tory peer David Frost in the Telegraph, that predicted a Labour landslide in the next election.
It has since emerged that a group of former Tory aides are suspected of working on a plot to replace the prime minister. One of them has been revealed as Will Dry, a former No 10 adviser who devised the YouGov polling questions.
