“But what I don’t want to do is go back to 10 years ago. Families fought over this. The country was on pause. I don’t want to have another referendum on this.”
Asked about Nigel Farage, she said: “Nigel Farage does not turn up to work. He wasn’t even at the Budget, said he didn’t have a seat. None of his MPs would give him something. Rupert Lowe actually turns up for work.
“You may disagree with what he says. I’m not interested in what his supporters said. I’m talking about those two men. Rupert Lowe turns up for work. Nigel Farage does not. He’s always moaning. He’s always whining.
“I’m getting on with the job, and what I want to see is a Conservative Party actually winning, because we’re the only credible alternative. Restore is not a credible alternative, but I’m afraid neither is Reform. And because they’re going backwards, because they can see they’re losing, and they can see that I’m more popular than Farage, they can now see that I’m the person that they want to take down.
“They’ve got nothing to complain about. They actually quite like my policies, a lot of Reform politicians, but they want to attack me personally, and I’m not indulging them. Let them spend their time on that. This is not a racist country, and I think people will make the call themselves.
“But what I would say actually is that well I’m not interested in doing deals with reform politicians or even with Restore politicians I do want the Reform voters back because we let them down and I want them to see as you said earlier we are under new management but all of this talk of her ethnicity this or that I’m not interested in that.
“Let them spend their time on that, I will talk about the economy, I’ll talk about our plans for immigration. I’ll talk about how the Conservative Party is cleaning up and doing better. We’ve got an offer for the future.”
Asked if Liz Truss was “deranged”, Mrs Badenoch said: “I did read Simon Heffer’s review, and I think the point is that she’s never said sorry, and she has to accept that something went wrong. If nothing went wrong, why did she sack her chancellor?
“Remember, she sacked Kwasi Kwarteng and then replaced him with Jeremy Hunt, and the entire budget got reversed under her. So she’s done something wrong, but she won’t accept that any of the mistakes were hers, and that’s something that we disavow.
“I always say that that Budget was a mistake because it did not have any spending cuts in it. She promised to pay everyone’s energy bills to the tune of about £150billion and £45billion of tax cuts. People focus on the tax cuts, but they don’t realise it was the public spending element that didn’t balance the books.”
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