But Mrs Badenoch, 42, says her father, a doctor, instilled in her a sense of “personal responsibility”. Last week, she resigned from the government to help force Mr Johnson’s resignation and in an interview with The Telegraph is now setting out why she launched a bid to lead the Conservatives. In short, he believes the government has lost its way. “I think we’ve accepted a consensus that’s not right – that the government should be involved in everything and do everything,” he says. But Ms Badenoch, who resigned as equalities and local government minister in a joint move with four friends and colleagues last week, believes the government is “doing a lot of things badly and doing things in the wrong way”.
Why didn’t the government just cut taxes?
As an example, the former finance minister singles out Rishi Sunak’s council tax rebate designed to help poorer households with their energy bills. Why, asks Ms Badenoch, didn’t the government just cut taxes instead of taking money from people and then giving some of it back? “Would it be simpler to let people keep their money in the first place instead of giving them council tax relief? It’s just become very complicated because the government is involved in a lot of micro-decisions and micro-policies, and we’re doing it in a whole range of areas.” Ms Badenoch also raises concerns that the Online Harms Bill risks criminalizing informed statements about biology and sex, describes herself as an “aid skeptic” and says the “arbitrary” Net Zero target was not properly thought through and that there is a “better way to these things.” It also warns that civil servant training appears to be weighted in favor of issues such as diversity and inclusion, resulting in civil servants then focusing on these areas of their work.
“Lighter, simpler, more agile government”
Ms Badenoch, who was a minister in the Leveling Up department, represents the Conservative leadership on a platform of “lighter, simpler, more agile government”. He fears that some MPs are also stuck on the idea that the state will fix most problems, with the flattening agenda leaning too much in favor of government spending. “One of the other things that I think went wrong is just accepting that consent [if you] put more money in that will fix the problem, that every penny you spend on something will have another penny of effect,” he says. “Sometimes the problem is something other than cash. I think when you listen to parliamentary debates, people are constantly talking about spending more money. We are elected to be legislators, not campaigners for cash.” Ms Badenoch laments that the government has “never really planned a very clear economic policy. We are often reactive, driven by facts, instead of saying here is what we are, here is what we believe. I think the reason we ended up in this position – and this is really central to what I think – is because we’re also afraid to tell people how hard things are and the truth.” Rishi Sunak and many other ministers have been particularly cautious about the Bank of England’s role in the cost of living crisis and Ms Badenoch, who served at the Treasury between February 2020 and September 2021, is concerned that Sunak has been too hands-off . Inflation currently stands at nine per cent – seven percentage points above the Bank’s target – a level he believes could have been avoided with a closer eye on the Treasury. “I think inflation is a huge problem,” says Ms Badenoch. “We had an inflation policy and we had an inflation target. You don’t always come across that and I don’t think we should stop the independent Bank of England, but we should actually highlight its work. “I think we stopped marking their work for a long time. If we had noted their work, we would have identified the issue around inflation earlier and done something and probably taken a different approach. I think maybe some of the money printing we did in 2021 wouldn’t have been necessary.”
Directness of speech
Ms Badenoch, whose campaign is backed by her friend Lee Rowley, another of the five ministers who resigned at the same time, is quickly attracting speculation about her potential as an “insurgent” candidate in a field with no clear front-runner. Her outspoken manner seems to be one of the factors that attracts MPs to her campaign. But by last night her declared backers included MP Eddie Hughes, who was a fellow minister at the Department for Leveling Up. Julia Lopez, the culture minister who also resigned along with Ms Badenoch and Mr Rowley. and 2019 backers Tom Hunt and Lee Anderson, both of whom are firmly on the right of the party. These supporters are likely to approve of her criticism of a Whitehall focus on “diversity and inclusion education”. As a minister, “I didn’t see any local government training … but I saw a lot of lessons on diversity and inclusion, mental health awareness and other things which are not bad things but are not the core mission. But when that’s the bulk of your training, that’s what civil servants will focus on.” Ms Badenoch is scathing about the Online Harms Bill, which was intended to protect internet users, and especially children, from sexual abuse, terrorists and other harm online. “This is something I’m very happy to be able to talk about now because I’m not a minister, so there’s no collective responsibility anymore. We had an online harms bill, which was supposed to look at very serious crime, online terrorism, child pornography and deal with it, and now it’s grown. It tries to fix many other problems it wasn’t originally intended to fix. Legislation is not always the answer.” Ms Badenoch adds: “We have now reached a point where we are legislating for hurt feelings. I think it will have significant free speech issues.”
Risk of criminalizing “statements of fact”
Ms Badenoch, who has been lambasted by transgender campaigners for her opposition to gender-neutral toilets, warns the government risks criminalizing “factual statements” about biology and sex. “One of the things I see is people saying that women are biologically female adults is harmful speech. We cannot legislate something that will create a crime out of such a simple, factual statement. And these are the things I think we’re doing wrong. If I were prime minister, I would actually scale back this bill to focus on what it was intended to do. And that’s what I mean by lean government. Fix the problem.” Ms Badenoch, whose jobs before politics included working as a secretary, maths teacher, shop assistant and software engineer, adds that the philosophy of “lean government” comes from “the way I think about things”. “I’m an engineer by training and that’s how I see things. You analyze the root cause of a problem and try to fix it from there before going elsewhere.”
A Government that has strayed from its course
How did the government manage to stray so far from the core conservative values Mr Johnson espoused during his leadership campaign and the 2019 election? “The road to hell is paved with good intentions. It always comes from trying to keep everyone happy. And I think that’s been one of the more difficult things to deal with as you get more and more of a majority. You’re building a larger coalition and it’s hard to keep everyone happy. “We have to be able to set an agenda [not] ask everyone what they want and then try to please everyone. I think this is an example of what happens when you do that.” Mrs Badenoch fears Theresa May has set Britain’s headline climate change target without an adequate plan to actually reduce carbon emissions to zero by 2050. “I think it was a mistake for us to set a target without having a clear plan for the cost and knowing what it would entail. Setting an arbitrary goal like this is the wrong way to go. “I’m not someone who doesn’t believe in climate change. I can see. But there is a better way to go about these things.”
Putting meat on the bones
With the help of a campaign team including Alex Morton, a Downing Street policy adviser under Theresa May, Mrs Badenoch is in the process of formulating more of the concrete policy commitments that will put meat on the bones of her bid for the party. A government led by Kemi Badenoch would practice “small-state conservatism, but we need to explain it better. At the moment we are not trying to explain what this is all about and quite often, the centre-right approach is counter-intuitive, like the Laffer curve. When you tell people well, you can actually get more money if you lower taxes, it’s not a direct or linear thing.” Ms Badenoch wants, she says, “to reduce the taxes people pay and just let them have more money in their pockets”. Part of her reason is that she understands both what it feels like to “have no money” and “what it’s like to be comfortable.” Mrs Badenoch’s father died in February and her eyes fill with tears when she talks about her family – “it’s still quite recent,” she explains. But he adds: “My parents were married for 45 years before my father died. He was in a middle-class, well-educated family. And that really shaped me because when I moved to this country,…
