Kemi Badenoch is being followed around the Tory party conference by her own comments about maternity pay. She had to explain what she was on about again when she had her main stage interview in the Birmingham hall this afternoon, telling Chris Hope that ‘I think maternity pay is quite important’, and that she was ‘answering a different question’ about business regulation. She then compared the row to the way Margaret Thatcher’s Women’s Own magazine comments about ‘there is no such thing as society’ were ‘cut down into a soundbite that was used to attack her’. She added:
When you are a leader, when you are a conservative, when you are making the argument for conservative principles, your opponents are going to try and turn it into something else. We need to decide who’s going to be leader of the party, not the left, not the Guardian, not the BBC, just Conservatives.
It’s quite telling that Badenoch mentioned the BBC and the Guardian, because despite insisting to the hall that she didn’t care very much about what was said about her, she does seem to expend quite a lot of effort on correcting things that are reported about her by those two outlets in particular. Hope nodded to that in his question, saying she’d had ‘quite a busy day’ yesterday having to clarify what she meant. This row is, for those in the Tory party who are unsure about Badenoch, symptomatic of one of their worries: that she ends up having a lot of fights with the press about things she did or didn’t say, rather than the things she actually wants to do as leader.
As for what she wants to do as leader, she told the hall that: ‘The state is very big. The welfare bill is absolutely astronomical, two weeks of the welfare bill is what we spend on justice, courts, probation etc. So we need to look at how we manage spending and public services. How we grow our economy, and then we can do the tax cuts. If you do them the wrong way around, we run into trouble.’
She was obviously talking about Liz Truss in that last sentence, and unlike Liz Truss, she clearly also thinks that winning trust back is a big job for the Conservative party. She said: ‘We will need to do several things to get the trust back. We need to acknowledge where we made mistakes. There’s no point just waiting for everybody to get sick and tired of Labour, or saying “I told you so”: we need to move on from where we left things by saying what we got wrong.’ Her argument about talking right and governing left guided that, and she often refused to answer what she called ‘micro policy’ questions, arguing that the more important thing here was the ‘principle’ behind what a party was doing.
Despite this, Badenoch had some very micro policy prescriptions for her own party. Like Tugendhat, she clearly thinks that the way to Conservative members’ hearts is to stop CCHQ emailing them all the time. She said: ‘I still get the emails that are sent from CCHQ, constantly asking for money and clearly written by some people who are not Conservatives, by the way, we’ve got to fix that – it’s not the chairman, it’s just – well, we won’t get into that. But we need to make sure that we are making party membership a real thing. We are a movement. We should be special. We need to give people an offer that is compelling, not just demand £25 a year.’
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