Badenoch says she will take the opposite approach to Labor on the economy

She was also critical of the leadership of her predecessor Rishi Sunak, saying he had lost voters’ trust because “promises on immigration and taxes have not been kept and that is something we need to change”.

Badenoch resigned from Boris Johnson’s government over his handling of the Chris Pincher case, which she felt led the public to think that “we no longer speak for them or care about them, we were in this for yourself.”

However, referring to the Partygate scandal, she said Johnson had fallen into a “trap”.

“A lot of what happened around Partygate wasn’t the reason I resigned – I thought it was exaggerated,” she said.

“We shouldn’t have created penalty notices… it meant we weren’t following our rules.”

Asked to apologize for the economic turmoil under Liz Truss, Badenoch stated she wanted to “draw a line under” the mistakes of previous leaders and refused to undergo an “autopsy” of every Conservative leader “over the last 14 years”. .

Instead, Badenoch said she was focused on rebuilding trust and creating a sense of unity within the party, although she said this was “very difficult”, especially when “not everyone wants to serve”.

She added: “The public didn’t trust us for many reasons – we didn’t keep our promises, but they also seemed divided.”

Referring to the loss of Conservative voters to Nigel Farage’s Reform UK in the last election, Badenoch denied she would only offer voters “more of the same”.

She said: “Nigel Farage and the success of reform is, in my view, a symptom of the Conservative Party not being clear and consistent enough about values ​​and how we use those Conservative values ​​to deliver them to the British people.

“If we get this right, I think people will start to see that reform is nothing more than a spoiler for the Conservatives and just creates more and more of a Labor government.”