Kemi Badenoch launches Tory leadership bid

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Kemi Badenoch has vowed to tell her Conservative colleagues and the country “hard truths”, as she launched her formal Tory leadership campaign by setting out her vision of a smaller state with more emphasis on the family.

Badenoch, the bookmakers’ favourite to win, accused the last Tory government — in which she was business secretary — of “drift” and having “talked right, but governed left”.

She is one of six Tory MPs running to lead the party following its worst election defeat in more than a century to Sir Keir Starmer’s Labour.

Former home and foreign secretary James Cleverly also launched his own campaign on Monday, ahead of a vote of Tory MPs on Wednesday that will begin to thin the field by knocking out the least popular contender.

He vowed to restore business confidence in his party and announced he would reinstate the last Tory government’s Rwanda deportation policy if he won power.

The other contenders for the leadership are former immigration minister Robert Jenrick, ex-security minister Tom Tugendhat, former home secretary Dame Priti Patel and Mel Stride, who was work and pensions secretary in the last Tory government.

An eventual winner is not due to be announced until November 2, but pressure is growing in some quarters of the party for the final stage of the race to be expedited so that Rishi Sunak’s successor is in place to respond to Labour’s first Budget on October 30.

In a launch at the Institution of Engineering and Technology in London on Monday, Badenoch cited her background as an engineer as proof she knew how to “fix problems” and “get stuff done”.

She also defended her reputation as combative, saying it was “on behalf of my party, not with my party”, and claimed she was “straight talking” and did not “do spin”.

In a policy-light speech made under the banner of her slogan “Renewal 2030”, Badenoch outlined five principles that would underpin her leadership: personal responsibility, citizenship, equality under the law, family and truth.

Her campaign also played a video in which she accused Starmer and Reform UK leader Nigel Farage of being too “miserable” and presenting a picture of the nation as “terrible”.

Cleverly, a former reservist army officer and ex-foreign secretary, launched his campaign in a hotel situated at the Old War Office building on Whitehall.

Having set out four key pledges — lower taxes, a smaller state, higher military spending and “a free and safe society” — he filled in new details, promising to axe stamp duty, cut the welfare budget, and increase defence spending to 3 per cent of GDP from its current level of about 2.3 per cent.

Vowing to boost economic growth, he said he would pare back red tape with a “one-in, two-out” approach to regulation, as he sketched out a vision to make Tories “the party of business once again”. Childcare is a sector that had been overly regulated by the government, he argued.

The lower number of Conservative MPs — just 121 after the election — means that candidates will need to secure the backing of 41 in order to guarantee a place in the final two.

Allies of Jenrick claim it is “nailed-on” that he will secure the backing needed to reach the final shortlist of two.

Jenrick is presenting himself as the candidate who can put Farage “out of business” by taking a tough line on immigration, including pulling out of the European Convention on Human Rights.

But his team insists he can also win the backing of centrist MPs, who believe he offers a fresh and professional approach. Shadow justice secretary Edward Argar, from the centre left of the party, has backed Jenrick.