Tory leadership contest should be brought forward from November, says Tom Tugendhat – UK politics live | Politics

Kemi Badenoch told Times Radio she was not backing calls for the end of the Tory leadership contest to be brought forward.

Asked if the contest should end earlier, she replied: “No, it’s fine.”

She also said, if she were to win, she would offer jobs to all three other candidates still in the contest. Asked if that included “even Robert Jenrick”, she replied “even Robert Jenrick”.

The leadership candidates are under orders from party officials to avoid blue-on-blue attacks. But, in so far as there have been personal attacks, they have involved Badenoch and Jenrick, the two favourites. (See 9.27am.)

Robert Jenrick, the current favourite in the Tory leadership contest, has claimed that he has been subject to a degree of snobbery in the Tory leadership contest.

Asked if he had encountered snobbery, he said:

I think you do have that sometimes and I’m not ashamed to be described as provincial.

Somebody I think gave a quote to one of the newspapers over the weekend saying that I was from the Midlands. Look, people who come from places like I come from often get subjected to a degree of snobbishness, but that’s water off a duck’s back to me.

Jenrick’s parents grew up working class and he was brought up in the Midlands. He went to a private school, but it was Wolverhampton grammar school, not an elite establishment like St Paul’s school in London (which is where Tom Tugendhat went). Jenrick subsequently went to Cambridge University and worked as a corporate lawyer before becoming an MP.

Jenrick, who is MP for Newark in Nottinghamshire, also said the Tory party should be “the trade union of the working people of this country”. He told Times Radio:

I think the Conservative party is at its best when it’s the trade union of the working people of this country, when it’s representing hard-working people in all parts of our country, particularly the smaller cities and towns that I know well and I’m proud to represent.

In his own interview with Times Radio, Tugendhat said he was not aware of anyone being snobbish about Jenrick.

The Daily Mail and the Mail on Sunday have been serialising extracts from Boris Johnson’s memoirs over the past three days, and the latest lead story is what Johnson says in the book about China and Covid. Johnson says he believes a leak from a Chinese laboratory was to blame for the pandemic. As the Mail on Sunday reports, Johnson says:

The awful thing about the whole Covid catastrophe is that it appears to have been entirely man-made, in all its aspects.

It now looks overwhelmingly likely that the mutation was the result of some botched experiment in a Chinese lab.

Some scientists were clearly splicing bits of virus together like the witches in Macbeth – eye of bat and toe of frog – and oops, the frisky little critter jumped out of the test tube and started replicating all over the world.

This is not something Johnson said when he was prime minister, and not something that most western leaders have been willing to say – partly because the evidence for this is not conclusive, but more because saying this would infuriate China.

UPDATE: According to a recent article for the New Statesman, “a new study by an international team concludes it is more likely that the virus emerged from wild animals sold at the [Wuhan] market and not from a lab escape”.

On Saturday Jason Groves in the Mail said the Conservative party is close to agreeing to bring forward the end date of the Tory leadership contest, so that a new leader is in place for the budget, which is on Wednesday 30 October. By convention, the leader of the opposition replies to budget statements.

Groves said:

Senior Conservatives are in talks about bringing forward the announcement of the party’s new leader by a week from its current date of November 2.

This would allow the leader to take charge in time to respond to Ms Reeves’s ‘parliament-defining’ Budget on October 30 – and help prevent the climax of the contest being buried by the avalanche of news surrounding the US presidential election on November 5.

But it would cut short the time for the final two candidates to appeal to party members.

The plan was mooted in July when the date of the Budget was fixed. At that point, one of the six candidates objected to the idea of being thrust immediately into responding to the Budget, which is regarded as one of the toughest jobs an opposition leader faces.

Senior Tories now plan to push the idea again when the field of four is whittled down to two after this week’s Conservative Party conference.

Both candidates will have to agree for the plan to go ahead, but a source said they would be ‘advised they are making a big mistake if they don’t’.

In an interview with Times Radio this morning, Tom Tugendhat said he was in favour of the contest being brought forward.

He also said, if he were elected leader, he would appoint the three other candidates in the contest now to his shadow cabinet.

Pat McFadden, the Cabinet Office minister, defended Keir Starmer’s record on donations in his interview with Laura Kuenssberg.

He said that the clothes were campaign donations because “presentation, whether we like or not, is part of a campaign”. And he defended the right of MPs to accept tickets to events, saying people wanted to see politicians at events like this.

He also said the current rules on what MPs have to declare in the register of members’ interests were unfair, because opposition MPs and backbenchers have to declare hospitality but ministers don’t (in theory because ministerial hospitality is declared in the register of ministers’ interests). McFadden said Labour would change this rule so all hospitality has to be declared in the MPs’ register.

Turning to Labour, Kuenssberg broadcast an interview with Rosie Duffield recorded last night. In it Duffield repeated the reasons for her resignation set out in her letter to Keir Starmer.

Asked if she thought Starmer had a problem working with women, Duffield said she did. She said:

I’m afraid I do, yes [think Starmer has a problem with women]. I mean, I’ve experienced it myself.

Most backbenchers that I’m friends with are women and most of us refer to the men that [surround Starmer] as the lads, you know, and it’s very clear that the lads are in charge.

Duffield also said those “lads” were the ones would had been briefing against her.

Kuenssberg asks about the NHS, and something Badenoch said in an interview in the Times yesterday. Badenoch told the paper:

I don’t think we are ready for changing the principle of free at the point of use, certainly not immediately. If we are going to reform things like that, I think we need to have a serious cross-party, national conversation.

This implied that Badenoch would favour charging for the NHS at some point.

Q: Should the NHS be free at the point of deliver forever?

Badenoch says there is a consensus in favour of free at the point of use at the moment. But there are many ways to deliver a free at the point of use service that don’t need the government to be involved in every aspect, she says.

Q: The Times comment implies that one day you might backing charging for NHS services.

Badenoch says: “It might be that the public decide that.”

Q: But what is your view?

Badenoch says she has given her view. She is not in favour of charging now.

Q: But you might change your mind in the future?

Badenoch says she can’t say whether she will change her mind in the future. But she is saying what she thinks now, she says.