Kemi Badenoch will attack the Conservative party’s record under Boris Johnson and Theresa May on Brexit, the economy, net zero and immigration in a speech aimed at “rebuilding trust”.
The Tory leader, who is competing with the sharp rise in popularity of Nigel Farage’s Reform UK party, will “acknowledge the Conservative party made mistakes” under her predecessors.
Badenoch will single out the decision to pursue Brexit without a plan for economic growth outside the EU, the failure to bring down migration despite repeated promises to do so, and the legal commitment to achieve net zero emissions by 2050 without specifying how.
Her words are an acknowledgment of the Conservatives’ responsibility for the UK’s weak growth over the past five years. They serve as a public rebuke to May and Johnson, who steered the UK’s departure from the EU after the 2016 referendum.
May was also the prime minister who wrote the UK’s commitment to net zero by 2050 into law. Badenoch has been critical of climate policies and described net zero targets in 2022 as “unilateral economic disarmament”.
She will say in her speech: “For the next four years and beyond, we are going to be telling the British people the truth, even when it’s difficult to hear. The truth about the mistakes we made. The truth about the problems we face. And the truth about the actions we must take to get ourselves out of this mess.
“These mistakes were made because we told people what they wanted to hear first and then tried to work it out later. That is going to stop under my leadership. If we are going to turn our country around, we’re going to have to say some things that aren’t easy to hear.”
In November, the Tory leader set out how she believed her party failed on immigration, including by promising to bring numbers down after Brexit but failing to do so. Net immigration has soared since Brexit, reaching 685,000 in 2023. In 2019, the year the Conservatives vowed in their manifesto to bring down migration, it was 219,000.
On Thursday, Badenoch will argue that politicians across all parties “have not been honest with the public about the challenges we face” and that as a result “generations of leaders and entire ranks of senior managers have been trying and failing for a long time”.
