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Kemi Badenoch has told shadow ministers she wants a period of silence from Liz Truss, as the Conservative leader seeks to distance herself from her predecessor’s economic legacy.
Badenoch told the shadow cabinet last week that she wished Truss would stop intervening in British politics after the former prime minister wrote a “cease and desist” letter to Keir Starmer demanding he stop saying she crashed the economy.
With the Tory leader hoping to draw a line under the party’s recent political failures, several sources said she had expressed exasperation about Truss’s letter, which one shadow cabinet minister described as “absurd”.
The person said: “Kemi said it would be best if Liz would shut up for a while.” Referring to Truss’s letter to Starmer, they added: “It was absurd. I think she’s gone nuts.”
A second shadow cabinet minister added: “The thrust of it was Liz should stop making unhelpful interventions … that it would be much more helpful if Liz wasn’t as vocal.”
Badenoch made her comments during a meeting of the shadow cabinet after last Wednesday’s session of prime minister’s questions, according to several people who attended the meeting.
With UK borrowing rates surging and economists predicting the government could soon breach its fiscal rules, the Tory leader had tried to use PMQs to highlight the government’s economic difficulties.
Starmer responded by brandishing the letter sent by Truss’s lawyers just days earlier. The prime minister told the Commons: “She was complaining that saying she had crashed the economy was damaging her reputation. It was actually crashing the economy that damaged her reputation.”
One source close to Badenoch said: “There was agreement around the table [at the meeting] on the need to show Kemi was different to what had come before and a discussion held on how best to show we were moving on from the past.”
A spokesperson for Badenoch said she had not used the phrase “shut up”, but did not deny the main message of her comments. A spokesperson for Truss has been contacted for comment.
Badenoch has promised to use this year to tackle the Tories’ legacy from their time in power and to rebuild trust with voters. The day after the shadow cabinet meeting, the Conservative leader gave a speech in which she said the Tories made mistakes on immigration, exiting the EU without a growth plan, and pursuing net zero.
Some in the shadow cabinet are pushing her to be more explicit in her rejection of Truss’s economic agenda, in what they are saying would be a “Krushchev moment”, referring to the former Russian leader’s denunciation of Stalinism in 1956.
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They are urging Badenoch to reject the economic philosophy behind Truss’s “mini-budget”, which contained such large unfunded tax cuts that the markets rapidly lost faith in the UK and sent the country’s borrowing rates soaring.
So far Badenoch has steered clear of criticising her predecessor, but tensions between the two were revealed in this week’s edition of the Spectator. The magazine reported that Truss told one of its journalists in Washington that she believed Badenoch to be a “[Michael] Gove plant”, referring to the former cabinet minister and now the magazine’s editor.
Some senior Tories believe Badenoch should continue to avoid talking about Truss’s economic policy, not least because their party is now more trusted than Labour on the economy. The most recent poll by YouGov shows 22% of voters say they would most trust the Conservatives to handle the economy, while only 16% say Labour. The survey found 27% did not know.
One shadow cabinet minister said: “There is no need to speak at length about Truss and the mini budget. We already tackled that during Rishi Sunak’s time, and it might deflect attention from the government’s economic policies.”
