BUSINESS Secretary Kemi Badenoch has ruled herself out as a replacement for Rishi Sunak and backed the Prime Minister as Tory leader going into the next General Election.
She told GB News: “I do support the Prime Minister, if people want to know whether or not I supported Rishi they should look at my actions.
“When Liz Truss resigned from the premiership, the first thing I did was come out and say Rishi should be the Prime Minister and I gave the reasons.
“I have backed him consistently every time because I know how difficult his job is. I see him working so hard. No one works harder than that man.”
She was asked about new polling which suggests that the Tories would have a chance of winning with her in charge.
Badenoch said: “No, it isn’t compelling. Because this is not a popularity contest. We are not celebrities. There is a job to be done, and he can do that job.
“And also I think it’s really important that the public see that when somebody is in place as Prime Minister we don’t just keep disposing them – ‘oh, the polls don’t look so great, well let’s try somebody else’ – that’s not serious.
“How would I know that I wouldn’t be disposed of a couple of weeks later?
“You read the language that people use, people talking about installing Kemi as Prime Minister like I’m a set of Windows. These people don’t talk to me.”
Badenoch dismissed suggestions that she is too close to people who plotted to bring down Boris Johnson, as claimed in the book by former Culture Secretary Nadine Dorries.
“There are several things that I need to say. One, almost everything in Nadine’s book, for me, almost everything in the Nadine Dorries book is nonsense…
“What they’re doing is really insulting me and my intelligence that I couldn’t possibly be making decisions without these people telling me what to do.”
Asked if she had sacked the chairman of the Post Office, she said: “It’s a very odd organisation. It’s in the public sector but not quite and it fulfils a unique role, and they’ve been having difficulties on the board.
“And when I looked at it, I decided that, given everything that’s happened, given the renewed interest or the new interest in some cases into the Horizon scandal, we just needed someone different.”
On whether very young school children should be allowed to identify as a different gender, she said: “I have a four-year-old, she sometimes tells me that she’s a rabbit. That doesn’t mean I’m going to start giving her carrots for every single meal.
“We need to be able to allow children to be children without pandering to a lot of ideology that has no place, certainly not in a primary school.”
