Kemi Badenoch is set to deliver her first major speech of 2025, in which she will lay out proposals to “rebuild trust” in the Conservative Party.
Badenoch was elected as Conservative leader on 2 November when she beat rival Robert Jenrick, the now-shadow justice secretary, by around 10,000 votes. The leadership contest followed the resignation of Rishi Sunak, who left Downing Street after overseeing his party’s worst election defeat in modern history.
Following a six week-long election campaign from May to July, the Conservative Party was reduced to just 121 MPs and entered opposition for the first time since 2010.
In a speech on Thursday addressing her party’s catastrophic defeat, Badenoch will admit that politicians “across all parties” have not told the truth to voters.
The Conservative leader will say: “We are all getting poorer. Politicians across all parties have not told the truth about this and instead keep prescribing solutions that are actually making things worse.
“This problem is broader than one party, one leader, or one period of government. Generations of leaders and entire ranks of senior managers have been trying and failing for a long time. Many have not been honest with the public about the challenges we face. And others have not even been honest with themselves.”
“The truth is that Britain is failing to compete in a world that is changing. And Britain is not working for its citizens. Certainly not in the way it used to.
“The Conservative Party is under new leadership. For the next four years and beyond we are going to be telling the British people the truth, even when it’s difficult to hear. The truth about the mistakes we made. The truth about the problems we face. And the truth about the actions we must take to get ourselves out of this mess.
“Labour are having even worse problems than we did, because they announced policy without a plan. Policies without a plan are not policies… they’re just announcements.
“That’s why Labour are struggling. It’s the old cliche that ‘failing to plan, is planning to fail.’ Because when you haven’t worked out what you’re going to do in opposition, you will accept whatever you’re given in government.
“That’s why Rachel Reeves announced mad and bad ideas on snatching winter fuel and taxing family farms.
“Those options were presented to us, time and time again by officials, and we rejected them time and time again because they would hurt so many people for so little benefit. The chancellor took them because she has no ideas of her own. It’s the same with education.
“The schools bill going through parliament now has one or two bits on safeguarding that may be good… the rest of it is worse than garbage. It is pure vandalism. The new Labour government will not fix any of the problems we have faced for decades. Because they wasted their time in opposition. We will not do the same.
“The public will never trust politicians unless we can accept our mistakes. Labour are making a lot of mistakes. But the difference between me and Keir Starmer is that he doesn’t believe he’s ever made a mistake. I will acknowledge the Conservative Party made mistakes.
“We announced that we would leave the European Union before we had a plan for growth outside the EU.
“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.
“We announced that we would lower immigration, but immigration kept going up.
“These mistakes were made because we told people what they wanted to hear first and then 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.”
Josh Self is Editor of Politics.co.uk, follow him on Bluesky here.
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Source: Politics
