‘Is [Liz Truss] still in the party? You tell me!’
Kemi Badenoch appeared confused during a BBC interview on Friday when political editor Chris Mason asked whether she would consider expelling Liz Truss from the Conservative Party.
Rather than answering whether she would remove Truss from the party, Badenoch asked: “Is she still in the party?”.
Mason responded: “Well you tell me.” The Tory leader again said: “You tell me, you’re the one asking the question.”
The BBC journalist pointed out that Badenoch should really know the answer to that, stating: “Well you’re the party leader.”
The exchange came after Mason referenced a speech by shadow chancellor Mel Stride last Thursday, in which he “eviscerated” Truss, “his argument being that she trashed your party’s reputation for economic competence”.
Mason asked: “Why not throw her out of the party?”. He made a comparison to how Keir Starmer had thrown Jeremy Corbyn out of the Labour Party “as a badge of saying the party has changed”.
Badenoch said that the mini-budget “did not balance”. She added: “It wasn’t tax cuts, it was the … £150 billion of spending increases on energy bills that did not make sense. Look at what happened, people didn’t understand why we had done that.”
She acknowledged that Truss’s budget damaged the Tories’ “reputation for economic competence”. However, she said her focus is not on sorting out Truss.
Badenoch said: “It is not about any particular individual, I don’t want to be commenting on previous prime ministers, they’ve had their time, what am I going to do now. Removing people from a political party is neither here nor there in terms of what it is your viewers want to see.”
Olivia Barber is a reporter at Left Foot Forward
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