Kemi Badenoch has suggested she will offer all six candidates in the Tory leadership race a job in her shadow cabinet if she is elected leader.
The Tory leadership hopeful, who is competing against Robert Jenrick to become the next head of the Tory party, said she “did not know” if they would like the roles she would give them and that she has not yet made them any offers.
The current shadow housing secretary – who served as business secretary when the Conservatives were in power – dodged questions over whether she wanted to be prime minister, saying her ultimate ambition was to “make the country more Conservative” to deliver “better growth” and a “better life” for everyone.
She told the Politics Hub with Sophy Ridge: “I don’t think it’s about wanting to be prime minister.
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“I think it’s not an award. It’s not like winning a competition. It’s actually a very serious job that requires a lot of sacrifice.”
Acknowledging the potential downsides of the job, including the toll it could take on her family life, Ms Badenoch said the role of prime minister “changes your life forever. It changes the life of your family. So I’m very, very wary of saying, ‘Well, I want to be prime minister’.”
She added: “I am very well aware of how life could change, for the worse in, in many circumstances. But I also worry even more about the direction of the country and what will happen unless we can turn things around.”
Ms Badenoch is widely seen as the favourite to succeed Rishi Sunak as Conservative leader following the party’s worst ever general election result in July.
The race between herself and Mr Jenrick, a former immigration minister, has become increasingly acrimonious after her opponent claimed the party would “die” under her leadership.
It came after Ms Badenoch launched an attack on Mr Jenrick’s “integrity”, suggesting she was a better fit for the top job as she had never been sacked because of a “whiff of impropriety”.
The comments, made to The Telegraph newspaper, appeared to be a dig at Mr Jenrick’s involvement in a planning dispute when he was housing secretary in 2020 – a position he was later sacked from by Boris Johnson.
However, Ms Badenoch was challenged about her own integrity after she admitted that she had hacked the website of Baroness Harman in 2008 and added a picture of former prime minister Boris Johnson.
Robert Jenrick with wife Michal Berkner.
Pic: PA
Ms Badenoch responded by telling Ridge that she acknowledged she had committed a “summary offence” akin to a speeding ticket and that “I do like playing pranks… I have humour”.
The former minister admitted that while it was “very amusing at the time” before she was an MP herself, now that she was in parliament she has seen the “hassle” MPs receive.
Giving an insight into her character, Ms Badenoch said she was no “wallflower” and described herself as “blunt”, “forthright” and “confident”.
She also addressed some of the negative stereotyping she had received, including accusations that she was “aggressive” as well as “lazy”.
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But she said wanted to avoid making accusations of racism and misogyny because she wanted to “believe the best in everybody”.
Looking ahead to this week’s budget, where the state of the country’s public services will dominate the conversation, Ms Badenoch said she did not believe the UK was “earning enough for the public services that the country wants”.
“Right now, we’re paying more on debt interest than we’re spending on defence,” she said.
“We’re not earning enough in order to cover our costs, and we need to rewire the state and the system in order to deliver what people want.”
Regarding the funding of the NHS, she said “everything should be on the table for discussion”.
She also hit out at some recent policies floated by the Labour government, including a ban on smoking in pub gardens and plans for a football regulator – with the previous Tory government kickstarting plans for the latter.
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“I think that the state does infantilise a lot of things,” she said.
“Do we really need to ban smoking in pub gardens? Do we really need a football regulator?
“These things are micro, on their own – but the cumulative impact of everything that the state is doing, I think is too much.
“A lot of these things are not public services. We keep creating more bureaucracy, more regulation. And yet the public services are not improving.”
She continued: “I think that’s one of the things that we as a party got wrong – we, the Conservatives, follow this model.
“It’s what I call the Blairite sort of third way model. And maybe it worked in 1997 – but it does not work now.”
The party membership vote will close at 5pm on Thursday 31 October and the winner will be announced on Saturday 2 November.