Badenoch mocks Jenrick and Braverman as she tries to get Tories back on track after Reform defections

Kemi Badenoch has mocked her former Conservative Party colleagues who recently defected to Reform, accusing them of lashing out over failed leadership ambitions and having a “tantrum dressed up as politics”.

In a speech days after her party lost yet another former cabinet minister to Nigel Farage’s party, the Tory leader dubbed both Reform UK and Labour as “drama queens” as she sought to reframe the Conservatives as a party of “serious people”.

In what appeared to be a jibe at recent big-name defectors Robert Jenrick, Suella Braverman and Nadhim Zahawi, Mrs Badenoch suggested they had jumped ship after failing to secure positions in the shadow cabinet or peerages.

“To those who are defecting, who don’t actually disagree with our policies, I will say, I’m sorry you didn’t win the leadership contest,” she told a press conference on Wednesday, as she fought to rescue her party from months of dismal polling.

“I’m sorry you didn’t get a job in the shadow cabinet. I’m sorry you didn’t get into the Lords. But you are not offering a plan to fix this country. This is a tantrum dressed up as politics.

“When my kids have a tantrum, I don’t give up or change my mind. I send them to their room, and I say to everyone else, if that tantrum ever found its way into government, we would all pay the price, because just like Labour, they do not have a plan for government.”

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On Monday, controversial former home secretary Suella Braverman became the latest ex-Tory right-winger to defect to Reform, in what Mrs Badenoch branded on Wednesday as a “veterans event that turned into a defection rally”.

Earlier this month, former shadow justice secretary Robert Jenrick was dramatically sacked from the Tory front bench when Mrs Badenoch claimed he had been plotting in secret to defect in “a way designed to be as damaging as possible”.

The shock exit came just days after former Tory chancellor Mr Zahawi defected to Reform, after apparently unsuccessfully “begging” to be nominated for a peerage.

Denouncing the “psychodrama” seen across British politics, Mrs Badenoch insisted she “only wants Conservatives” in her party, and suggested those who don’t agree with her should “get out of the way”.

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“Let me be clear, the Conservative Party is going in a new direction. I was not elected to reheat the party with 1990s policies and I was not elected to dismantle the party so that Nigel Farage can finally have a go,” she said.

“I was elected by Conservative Party members to renew and rebuild. That is exactly what I am doing.”

She later added: “The people who don’t agree with this direction need to get out of the way. There are people in politics who don’t really know what they are doing or why. They just want to be in the room. They want to be on top. They want access, attention and advancement.

“When they don’t get their way, they create drama. What we need are people who are going to help get Britain working again, and that means we have to be a truly Conservative Party, so I won’t apologise to those walking away because they don’t like the new direction. We only want Conservatives.”

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She also questioned Reform UK’s capability of sitting in government, saying: “I can actually put together a shadow cabinet bigger than four people.

“And, no, this isn’t about left or right, it’s about right or wrong. We are right, they’re all wrong. Some people say that we need to split the difference and find the centre ground. It’s not about the centre ground, it’s about the common ground, and it is about common sense.”

Mrs Badenoch also signalled she disagreed with the more centrist group of Conservatives, urging her to pursue a moderate agenda as a point of difference with Reform.

She said: “This is my message to them. We’re about the future, not the past. We’re not trying to recreate 2006 and it’s not 2016 anymore. We are not refighting those battles. It’s 2026 and the world has changed. This is about the future and I am building a Conservative Party for the next decade and the next generation.”