The five remaining Conservative candidates to be the next UK prime minister took part in a TV debate on Channel 4 on Friday night. Kemi Badenoch, Penny Mordaunt, Rishi Sunak, Liz Truss and Tom Tugendhat featured in a programme hosted by Krishnan Guru-Murthy. In an often difficult night for all the candidates, Sunak openly ridiculed Truss’s tax plans. Condemning what he called a wider “unfunded spree of borrowing and more debt” among his competitors, he condemned the Truss’s proposal to put off repayments of public debt built up due to Covid. “There is no such thing as Covid debt,” a visibly irritated Sunak told the foreign secretary. “Debt is debt. And the answer to too much borrowing can’t be yet more borrowing. It’s as simple as that.” Mordaunt and Badenoch clash with visible enmity about the former’s views on trans rights. Mordaunt, meanwhile, asked about negative briefings about her from some of the other camps, refused to say she trusted the other candidates. A long section on trust saw none of the five willing say whether the prime minister they hope to replace, Boris Johnson, was honest. “Sometimes,” said Badenoch, while Mordaunt talked about “really severe issues”, and Truss spoke of “mistakes”. Tugendhat won applause by saying, simply: “No.”
Despite pressure from some Tory grandees including former Brexit minister David Frost to unite behind a single candidate representing the right of the party, Badenoch’s team said “She has no intention of stepping down and is in it to win.” It was revealed that Mordaunt has repeatedly advocated the use of homeopathy on the NHS. Homeopathy is a treatment based on the use of highly diluted substances that practitioners claim can cause the body to heal itself. Badenoch and Truss have declined to answer questions put to them by the LGBT+ Conservatives group by their deadline of 1pm today. The group gave each of the leadership contenders a three-question questionnaire. Tugendhat, Sunak and Mordaunt managed to answer on time, although the group has since reached out to Badenoch and Truss to encourage them to submit their answers. Boris Johnson is planning to stage parliamentary interventions on Ukraine, Brexit and levelling up, with allies of the outgoing prime minister hinting that those are the areas of his legacy he believes to be most under threat from his potential successor. Channel 4 has said an investigation into allegations made by the culture secretary, Nadine Dorries, that a reality TV show she appeared on used paid actors has found no evidence of fakery. The broadcaster asked the producers of the 2010 reality show Tower Block of Commons, in which Dorries was one of a number of MPs who went to live in deprived communities, to investigate the claims she made to the culture select committee in May. The Labour leader, Sir Keir Starmer, visited a section of the Berlin Wall earlier today while on a trip to the German capital to meet politicians and business leaders. Starmer was pictured by the landmark, erected in 1961 by the communist authorities to separate East and West Berlin. That is it from me, Martin Belam, for tonight. Thank you to my colleague Tom Ambrose for his live blogging earlier today. Tom will be back with you tomorrow, and I will be here on Sunday. Do join us. In the meantime, I suspect you might also enjoy John Crace’s sketch on today’s debates and hustings.