Ever since her unsuccessful but impressive run for the leadership last summer, Ms Badenoch has sought to balance her priorities
has made a striking play for the Tory grassroots with a party conference speech where she hit out at anti-Brexit campaigners, the trans rights movement and supporters of “critical race theory”.in a bid to show she is not trying to undermine the current Conservative leader even as she positions herself to be the next one.
She has often spurned the easy popularity wins – declining to endorse Liz Truss for leader even when it was clear she was overwhelming favourite, then backing Mr Sunak instead of Boris Johnson when Ms Truss fell. She raised hackles among some Brexiteer MPs by watering down legislation designed to strip out all EU rules from Britain’s legal system. And she is scrupulously loyal to the Prime Minister – more so than Suella Braverman, seen as her greatest rival for the leadership, who often comes close to contradicting This continued in her conference speech, where Ms Badenoch said: “We have in Rishi Sunak a Prime Minister who is making decisions for the long term interest of our country, even when he gets flak for it… He has the intellect and work ethic to steer us through whatever comes next, to tell the country what it needs to hear, not just what it wants to hear.” But at the same time, she made some clear attempts to reach out for activists: first on Brexit, saying: “Our political opponents are obsessed with viewing every problem as Brexit. Relentlessly talking down our country.”Then on race relations – she hit out at those who “tell children like mine that the odds are stacked against them” and said: “I tell my children that is the best country in the world to be black – because it’s a country that sees people, not labels.” Ms Badenoch finally put herself firmly on the side of those who believe that the transgender rights movement threatens the safety of women, saying: “The left accuses us of fighting a culture war. But we will not apologise for fighting for common sense. “I will not apologise for fighting for a society that knows what a woman is.” She praised controversial groups such as the LGB Alliance which claim to campaign for women’s rights but are also accused of bigotry towards trans people. The Business Secretary is hard to pin down on the political spectrum: her closest allies are a clutch of junior ministers who remained loyal to Mr Johnson before quitting en masse as his premiership unravelled, and who have since kept their heads down while working to deliver policy wins. Her best hopes of becoming the next Conservative leader lie with being all things to all people, – and her conference speech takes her one step closer.OpinionHunt announces plan to cut civil service by a fifth so he can use savings to pay for tax cuts
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