The Tories are gearing up for a bun fight in Birmingham this week as the party gathers for its first conference since July’s catastrophic defeat.
A so-called ‘beauty parade’ of the four remaining candidates vying to become Leader of the Opposition got underway this weekend with a flurry of receptions and rallies at the International Conference Centre, while party activists and MPs also unpick the scale of the summer loss and debate the party’s future policy direction.
And following the conference, MPs will vote again to whittle down the pack to a final two – before Conservative party members vote for a new leader. The winner will be announced on November 2.
The Tory party conference kicked off with a sparky exchange on immigration and maternity pay between the two frontrunners, Badenoch and Jenrick.
The former business secretary was questioned by the BBC’s Laura Kuenssberg about an article for the Telegraph in which she set out plans for a “hard nosed” immigration policy, adding “not all cultures are equally valid.”
Badenoch was also forced to clarify that “of course I believe in maternity pay” after telling Times Radio she was concerned about the “excessive” burden of regulation on businesses.
“Businesses are closing. Businesses are not starting in the UK, because they say that the burden of regulation is too high,” she said. “The exact amount of maternity pay, in my view, is neither here nor there… we need to have more personal responsibility. There was a time when there wasn’t any maternity pay and people were having more babies.”
Meanwhile former migration minister Jenrick called for a legally binding cap on immigration to be voted on by MPs, and said the Tories should be “firmly on the side of parents and working mums”.
Jenrick said: “I am a father of three young daughters. I want to see them get the support they need when they enter the workplace. Our maternity pay is among the lowest in the OECD.”
He added there were “plenty of other ways that we can help small businesses to prosper other than targeting maternity pay”.
Speaking at a campaign event, former security minister Tugendhat said he was running “because we need to turn this party back into what it should be, which is a campaign winning machine, an organisation ready to take the fight to Labour, to point out the appalling record of this socialist administration in just three months, and to make sure we do not give them a free hand for the next four years”.
And Cleverly, previously home and foreign secretary, refused to pin the summer’s defeat on one particular former prime minister, but called for an end to the “constant infighting”.
He said: “The British people told us that they wanted us to think about them, not to think about ourselves.”