Kemi Badenoch failed to declare a meeting that she held with Rupert Murdoch days after she was appointed to the cabinet – in a breach of transparency rules. The business and trade secretary reacted angrily on Monday on social media after it was revealed that she had privately met the media mogul and other executives from his News Corp company in New York in September 2022. Murdoch was reported by Politico to have questioned Badenoch for 20 minutes in an atmosphere that was said to have been described as akin to a job interview by one of those present. A government spokesperson described the fact that the meeting with Murdoch was not made public as “an oversight”. Nevertheless, the failure to declare the meeting appears to have contravened the ministerial code of conduct, which states: “Meetings with newspaper and other media proprietors, editors and senior executives will be published on a quarterly basis, regardless of the purpose of the meeting.” The spokesperson said: “The relevant meeting transparency returns were not submitted for the secretary of state for September 2022. This will be corrected when the department submits the next transparency return.”
Sources in Badenoch’s department said: “This meeting had civil servants and people from the diplomatic corps at it and was certainly not some sort of secret encounter. Kemi was under the impression that it had been fully declared.” Badenoch, who enjoys strong grassroots support from Conservative members and is believed to harbour hopes of mounting a renewed leadership bid in future after finishing fourth in last year’s contest, was seen heading in to an event on Monday being convened for business leaders at the Conservative party conference. At about the same time, she hit out on X – formerly known as Twitter – at Politico, tweeting: “This is a lie. I had numerous meetings with businesses in the US, organised for me as the new trade secretary by the embassy. One of them was News Corp, with civil servants and embassy staff present. They logged all meetings but forgot to send the returns. Stop spreading fake news.” Earlier in the day, Badenoch used large chunks of a speech at the Conservative conference in Manchester to hit out at Labour and claim that advocates of identity politics are seeking to “re-racialise” society. She claimed the Labour party wanted to “bend the knee before this altar of intolerance”, and invoked the words of Martin Luther King, saying: “We believe … people should be judged by the content of their character – not the colour of their skin. And if that puts us in conflict with those who would re-racialise society, who would put up the divisions that have been torn down – well, conference, all I can say is: bring it on.”