Kemi Badenoch has just slammed the policies from the Conservative government she was part of in her first major speech of 2025.
As she promised to “rebuild trust” in her party, the new Tory leader laid into the policies of Boris Johnson, Liz Truss and Rishi Sunak – apparently forgetting that she held eight ministerial jobs between 2019 and 2024.
Badenoch said she would “acknowledge the Conservative Party made mistakes”, and claimed the Tories just told people “what they wanted to hear first and tried to work it out later”.
“That is going to stop under my leadership. If we are going to turn our country around, we’re going to have to say some things that aren’t easy to hear,” she said – before attacking some of the core policies championed by her predecessors.
Brexit deal
“We announced that we would leave the European Union before we had a plan for growth outside the EU,” she said, in an apparent dig at Theresa May.
The former prime minister - who entered Downing Street within weeks of the 2016 Brexit referendum - triggered Article 50 at the end of March 2017, beginning the two-year countdown to Britain quitting the EU.
Badenoch was only elected to parliament in 2017, but she dismissed worries about a no deal Brexit at the time, telling The Standard: “I don’t think it will get to that. People talk about a divorce bill. You can’t be married to 27 people. It wasn’t a marriage — it was a business partnership that we have decided isn’t quite working for us. Will it be tough? All change is tough.”
She also voted for both Johnson and Theresa May’s Brexit withdrawal agreement, and served as international trade secretary under Truss where she handled post-Brexit deals.
Net zero
The Tory leader also said today: “We made it the law that we would deliver Net-Zero [carbon emissions] by 2050. And only then did we start thinking about how we would do that.”
That was another May policy, but she was a minister in Johnson’s government when he announced the Net Zero Strategy in 2021.
She was also an MP when parliament passed legislation to commit the UK to a legally binding target of net zero carbon emissions by 2050 on June 24, 2019.
Badenoch even said in the debate that “many of my constituents, especially schoolchildren, will be delighted by this announcement,” although she did ask how would the plan be “achievable and affordable”.
Immigration
“We announced, year after year, that we would lower immigration, but despite our efforts immigration kept going up,′ Badenoch said in her speech.
In November 2023, the then business secretary actually defended immigration numbers, saying Rishi Sunak would do “whatever it takes to get flights [to Rwanda] off the ground” to deter illegal migration.
And, despite once being minister for equalities under Johnson, she also said in September that “not all cultures are equally valid” when it comes to deciding who can come into the UK.
Grooming gangs
Responding to questions from journalists, Badenoch said the Tories should have held a national inquiry into grooming gangs while they were in office – despite never using the Commons to raise the issue herself when she was a minister.
Speaking today, she said: “I do think that we should have had a national inquiry. We commissioned inquiries, we had local inquiries.
“We did some things, but as the results came in my view is we should have done more.”
What’s the response been?
Labour chair Ellie Reeves said Badenoch was doing the opposite of rebuilding trust, and offering just more “infighting”.
She claimed the Tory leader had offered “another speech, but no apology for her role in Liz Truss’ disastrous mini-Budget that crashed the economy and left a £22bn black hole in the public finances”.
Lib Dem deputy leader Daisy Cooper slammed it as a “half-hearted apology”.
She added: “It will take a lot more than this half-hearted apology for the people of this country to forgive or forget the toxic legacy of the Conservative government, in which Badenoch herself so prominently served.”