Kemi Badenoch will seek to revive her leadership fortunes by positioning herself as the intellectual heavyweight candidate that can tell the Tories hard truths, publishing a 22,000-word essay on her diagnosis of the challenge for Conservatism.
Badenoch launched the treatise on Monday night after her first appearance on the main stage of the conference in Birmingham, where she said the public did not know what the party stood for.
The shadow housing secretary, whose campaign at the Tory conference has been upset by comments she made on maternity pay, told attenders: “As Conservatives we’ve allowed too many people to tell us who we are.
“We’ve allowed too many people to portray us as the bad guys. Labour are in, everybody can see they’re the bad guys. We’re the good guys.”
She defended the decision – criticised by other candidates – to allow the leadership contest to run on beyond the 30 October budget, saying the former leader Rishi Sunak and former chancellor Jeremy Hunt were best placed to respond, not the new leader.
“We have a prime minister who’s never been in the Treasury,” she said. “We have a leader of the opposition who used to be chancellor. We have a shadow chancellor who knows that building [the Treasury] inside out. We can do this. It’s not about who’s becoming leader a few days later. It is about us using all of the talents within our party.”
She said her comments on maternity pay being excessive “got cut down into a soundbite” that was used to attack her and added: “When you are a leader, when you are a Conservative, when you are making the argument for Conservative principles, your opponents are going to try and turn it into something else. We need to decide who’s going to be leader of the party; not the left, not the Guardian, not the BBC, just Conservatives.”
Badenoch’s essay, Conservatism in Crisis: Rise of the Bureaucratic Class, argues that her party must halt the constant expansion of regulatory bodies. “Too many in our party think that the bureaucratic class and their demands should not be confronted, and they are not prepared to make the trade-offs we need in order to get our economy moving again,” she writes.
“Across the west, formerly dominant rightwing parties have either collapsed, been taken over by outsiders such as Trump, formed new alliances with populist upstarts, or become marginalised as a new right in the west based on the nation-state dominates.”
In the conversation event, Badenoch said she would not form a pact with Nigel Farage’s Reform and that she would review the net zero target, arguing: “There’s no point being the first to get to net zero, if we’re also the first to get bankrupt.”
Robert Jenrick, whose team are confident he will be one of the two candidates to go to the members’ vote, appeared at a series of fringe events. His key pitch against Badenoch is his call for the immediate withdrawal from the European convention on human rights (ECHR) as the only way to save the Conservatives and see off the threat from Reform.
Badenoch has said she would not initially seek to leave and has blamed a culture in the Home Office for why deportations are not pursued.
Jenrick kicked off with an early-morning rally outside the main conference zone, styled as a “rebel” event to protest at the lack of main-stage presence for the candidates.
He said his party would die if it did not commit to quitting the ECHR, a subject he couched in the language of Brexit, saying this was a chance to “get migration done”.
He criticised opponents such as Tom Tugendhat for saying they would initially seek to change the way the convention works. “Frankly, our party doesn’t have a future unless we take a stand and fix this problem. It’s leave or die for our party – I’m for leave.”
At a later fringe event, Jenrick insisted that such a robust immigration-based platform would “suck the oxygen away from Reform”, adding: “I think that leaves them in quite a difficult place.”
Jenrick will be questioned on the main stage of the Conservative conference on Tuesday, along with another candidate, James Cleverly.
Cleverly, who is hoping to capitalise on Badenoch’s difficulties, distanced himself from the more moderate side of the party. “If you want to describe my low-tax, less regulation, more freedom, commonsense, not messing about, ‘get with the programme’ attitude as leftwing, give it your best shot,” he said.
But the former home secretary said he thought Rishi Sunak’s “stop the boats” phrase was an error. He said: “It was an unachievable target. We failed to communicate our successes so everyone believed we achieved nothing.”
