Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch said her approach to the economy would be “completely the opposite” to that of Chancellor Rachel Reeves.
Speaking to the BBC’s Laura Kuenssberg on her first day in the job, Badenoch gave a first glimpse of her policy priorities, including on reversing the VAT hike for private schools.
She said the Conservatives “got a lot of things wrong” ahead of their historic election defeat, including on immigration and tax, but refused to give a “post-mortem” of her predecessors and claimed the Partygate scandal was “overblown”.
With appointments to her shadow cabinet expected in the next couple of days, Badenoch said she wanted to show the party was united with a meritocratically selected front bench.
When asked whether she would reverse the chancellor’s decision to increase employers’ national insurance (NI) contributions, Badenoch said she is not the chancellor and also has “very few” MPs.
“We’re not going to be able to oppose anything in terms of getting legislation through,” she said, adding she could only “make the argument that raising taxes in this way… is not going to grow our economy and will leave all of us poorer”.
However, when asked directly whether she would reverse the VAT hike on private schools, Badenoch was definite, saying “yes, yes, I would… because it’s a tax on aspiration, but it won’t raise any money” and was therefore “against our principles”.
She also told Ms Kuenssberg that “it is not the government that creates growth, it is business that creates growth”, adding that this is “completely the opposite of what Rachel Reeves is doing”.
Badenoch, who is the first black leader of a Westminster party, said she not only disagrees with Reeves’ economic policies but also the way she has discussed being the UK’s first woman chancellor in 800 years.
She said: “I think that the best thing will be when we get to a point where the colour of your skin is no more remarkable than the colour of your eyes, or the colour of your hair.
“I find it astonishing that Rachel Reeves keeps talking about how she’s the first female chancellor, which in my view is a very, very low glass ceiling within the Labour Party, which she may have smashed.
“Nowhere near as significant as what other women in this country have achieved.”
She was also critical of her predecessor Rishi Sunak’s leadership, saying he had lost trust with voters because “promises on immigration and on tax were not kept and that is something that we need to change”.
Badenoch resigned from Boris Johnson’s cabinet over his handling of the Chris Pincher affair, which she said resulted in the public thinking “we were no longer speaking for them or looking out them, we were in it for ourselves”.
But in regards to the Partygate scandal, she said Johnson walked into “a trap”.
“A lot of the stuff that happened around Partygate was not why I resigned – I thought it was overblown,” she said.
“We should not have created fixed penalty notices… that was us not going with our principles.”
When asked to apologise for the economic turmoil under Liz Truss, Badenoch said she wanted to “draw a line” under the faults of previous leaders and refused to go through a “post-mortem” of every Conservative leader “for the past 14 years”.
Instead, Badenoch said her focus was on rebuilding trust and creating a perception of unity within the party, although she said that was “very tricky”, particularly when “not everybody wants to serve”.
She added: “The public didn’t trust us for a whole bunch of reasons – not keeping promises but also looking disunited.”
Addressing the loss of Conservative voters to Reform UK, led by Nigel Farage at the last election, Badenoch denied she would only be offering voters “more of the same”.
She said: “Nigel Farage and the success of Reform are a symptom of the Conservative party in my view, not being clear enough and consistent enough about values and about how we were using those Conservative values to deliver to the British people.
“If we get this right, then I think people will start to see that Reform is nothing but a spoiler for the Conservatives and just creates more and more Labour government.”
