Kemi Badenoch has clashed with members of her own party over the government’s post-Brexit business policy during a heated Commons committee session that highlighted ongoing Conservative tensions over the issue.
The business secretary argued openly with the Tory backbenchers David Jones and Richard Drax about her decision to reduce the number of business regulations the government is planning to scrap now that the UK has left the EU.
The angry exchanges gave a rare public window into the divisions within the party over the retained EU law bill, which Badenoch decided to scale back last month.
In its original form, the bill would have automatically deleted about 4,000 pieces of business regulation that were put into UK law because the country was an EU member, unless ministers specifically decided they should still apply. Badenoch scaled back the scope of the bill to apply to just 600 regulations, after being warned civil servants would not have time to review such a large number of rules in time for the deadline.
Jones, the deputy chair of the European Research Group, which represents hardline Brexit supporters within the party, accused Badenoch of being “disrespectful” towards the Commons by changing the bill in the Lords after it had passed the lower house.
He said: “You come back to the Commons, it having gone through the Lords, presenting to the Commons a fait accompli,” he said. “Don’t you think that’s disrespectful of the House of Commons?”
Badenoch defended both the changes and the way she made them, saying the bill had been unworkable in its original form. “What is the point of us MPs voting through legislation which is not doing what we want it to do, just so we can say, ‘Well, we passed this legislation’?” she asked.
She also criticised Jones for allowing details of their private conversations about the issue to leak to the press. “Something you’re not saying is that we had private meetings,” she said. “We had private meetings where we discussed this extensively, because I knew you had concerns.
“And it’s public knowledge that we had private meetings, because when I thought I was having private and confidential meetings, I was reading the contents in the Daily Telegraph.”
Badenoch had a similar interaction with Drax, who accused her of creating “distrust” among some Tories who fear “this bonfire won’t take place”.
She responded: “It is not the bonfire of regulations – we are not arsonists. I’m certainly not an arsonist. I’m a Conservative.”
The tense exchanges give a sense of how Badenoch’s decision to scale back the bill has angered many on the right of her party, and damaged her reputation with party members – something that could prove decisive if there is a Tory leadership contest after the election.
Last month’s ranking of cabinet ministers by ConservativeHome, the Tory grassroots website, saw Badenoch’s net satisfaction score drop nearly 15 points, putting her fourth behind the defence secretary, Ben Wallace, the foreign secretary, James Cleverly, and the leader of the Commons, Penny Mordaunt.
