Kemi Badenoch, the shadow housing and communities secretary, has entered the Conservative leadership race with a pledge to get the Tories back into government by 2030. Badenoch, the bookmakers’ favourite to succeed Rishi Sunak, said she would focus on renewing the Conservative brand around the notions that “above all else, [the government] has to serve its own citizens” and “we can’t control immigration until we reconfirm our belief in the nation state”. In an op-ed for the Times, Badenoch writes: “If I have the privilege to serve, we will speak the truth again. “That is why today my campaign is launching with an explicit focus on renewing our party for 2030 – the first full year we can be back in government and the first year of a new decade.”
The shadow paymaster general, John Glen, said the Conservatives needed to undergo “a rigorous process” that involved “demonstrating some humility” and having a clear plan of how to win back the trust of the British people. Badenoch has become the sixth Tory to enter the contest, joining Dame Priti Patel, Mel Stride, Tom Tugendhat, James Cleverly and Robert Jenrick in the race to replace Sunak. “Our public services will never fully recover from the pandemic until we remember that government should do some things well, not everything badly,” Badenoch writes. “At the foundation of our renewal, and indeed the reassembly of the Conservative family, is a confident set of principles about how our economy should work, and for whom it should work. “The wealth of our nation is built upon our historic ability to capture the ingenuity and industry of our people, and the willingness of many to trade risk for reward. It’s become a dirty word, but our renewal must also mean a renewal for capitalism.” Grassroots Conservative supporters are understood to be angry at MPs for not putting their favoured choice, Suella Braverman, on the ballot. Members of the Conservative Democratic Organisation (CDO), which was founded by furious Tories after Boris Johnson and then Liz Truss were removed, have questioned why the party so far has “defied its core supporters”, warning that senior MPs could “quickly fall out of favour”. A survey answered by 3,412 of 14,000 CDO members asking who their desired leader would be from Braverman, Badenoch, Patel, Jenrick, Tugendhat and Cleverly revealed Braverman to be the favourite with 1,153 votes, followed by Badenoch with 475.
Claire Bullivant, founder of the Conservative Post , said: “If Suella is kept off the ballot, then it will only serve to widen the rift between ordinary party members and MPs. MPs need to remember who stuck by them, delivered their leaflets, knocked doors and took abuse for them during a very difficult campaign. “Unfortunately, this unacceptable behaviour by certain MPs will have consequences. We are already seeing a flight of thousands of members defecting to Reform. If Suella is not even allowed on the ballot, that switch to Nigel Farage will only get worse and accelerate.” On Sunday evening, Braverman announced she would not be running, despite having received the backing she needed. “Although I’m grateful to the 10 MPs who wanted to nominate me for the leadership, getting on to the ballot is not enough,” she wrote in an article for the Telegraph. “There is, for good or for ill, no point in someone like me running to lead the Tory party when most of the MPs disagree with my diagnosis and prescription” of what had gone wrong and how to fix it, she said. She said the party’s disastrous election result was down to failures on migration, taxes and “transgender ideology”. “I’ve been branded mad, bad and dangerous enough to see that the Tory party does not want to hear this. And so I will bow out here,” she said. According to polling by Savanta carried out between 19 and 21 July, Patel is the least popular contender in the race, at minus 28 points with the public and seven points with 2024 Conservative voters.