Jeremy Hunt addresses Tory conference

Michael Gove has said he will not endorse a candidate in the Conservative leadership race, writes Genevieve Holl-Allen.

The former cabinet minister, who will take up the editorship of the Spectator, said his support would be “a blight on their prospects”.

Asked whether he would back a candidate, he told a fringe event: “I won’t endorse a candidate because my endorsement would be a blight on their prospects.

“So I don’t want to burden any of them.”

Sir Winston Churchill would be “turning in his grave” if he knew how his European convention on human rights (ECHR) had been twisted to protect terrorists, murderers, rapists and paedophiles, Robert Jenrick said.

Speaking at a rally at the Tory conference in Birmingham, the former immigration minister and contender for the party leadership repeated his pledge to take the UK out of the ECHR if he was elected Prime Minister “as soon as possible.”

He said the ECHR which was created by Churchill and European partners in the aftermath of the Second World War, the horrors of the Holocaust and the tyranny of Stalin had been a “noble document.”

But it had been “twisted and bent out of all shape by activist judges, by charities and NGOs who sought to misuse it from the 1970s onwards,” said Mr Jenrick.

He said the ECHR had made it impossible for the UK to “deport terrorists who are here walking our streets, to remove dangerous foreign criminals like rapists and murderers and paedophiles who we need to get out of our country to protect the public.”

He cited a case, first revealed by The Telegraph, of a Ugandan murderer who clubbed a man to death in the back of a London ambulance but who will not be deported in order to protect his mental health.

Lawyers for the murderer – who has also been granted anonymity – successfully argued that it would be “inhumane” under the ECHR because Uganda has not got the required facilities to treat his mental ill health.

“That is absurd, but is also shameful,” said Mr Jenrick. “I am not prepared to put our citizens at risk any longer. And then there are dozens of terrorists in our prisons on our streets because of our continued membership of the ECHR.”

Lord Frost has warned that the Tory party could “easily just disappear” if it does not move to the Right and win back voters from Reform, writes Nick Gutteridge.

The former chief Brexit negotiator said the party “is beginning to break down” across the country as traditional supporters abandon it.

He told the Conservative conference that many loyal voters had broken their “psychological loyalty” at the last election by voting for Reform.

Speaking at a Popular Conservatives fringe event, he said: “A lot of members clearly went to Reform or just gave up being involved in the party.

“The reason I worry is it seems to me for the first time in a very, very long time the party in the country is beginning to break down and some of the instinctual loyalties are beginning to break down.

“If we create conditions for more of that to happen the party could easily just disappear. It doesn’t have a right to exist, it’s got to stand for something and we’ve come very close to not standing for anything.”

Sir Graham Brady declined to back anyone at this point of the Conservative leadership contest.

He told The Daily T: “I think it’s very difficult to say. I’m not going to back anybody certainly until we’re down to the two, because we’ve still got another stage of the parliamentary process.

“I take considerable comfort from the fact even though there are only 121 Conservative MPs, I think we have four pretty incredible candidates at this point.

“The last time there were votes I voted twice for Kemi to be leader. I think she’s a very interesting candidate, I didn’t think she was ready at this point. This is going to be obviously a period of four or five years of opposition… But I’m a big fan of all four of them and I will see who impresses over the contest.”

Sir Graham Brady told The Daily T podcast: “My view on that is very simple. In our electoral arrangements, in our constitutional arrangements, only a broad church, centre-Right party can keep the socialists out of government.

“And the voting public has got to take that on board and respond accordingly.

“I think after four or five years of a very painful Labour government, it’s going to be about what’s the most effective way of bringing it back and keeping the socialists out of power.”

Sir Graham Brady said the Tories may have held more seats had Rishi Sunak called the election later.

“There are an awful lot of seats where a pretty small shift would have made the difference,” he told The Daily T’s Kamal Ahmed and Gordon Rayner.

“It’s painful to look at results where you think the tiniest thing might have made a difference.”

Sir Graham Brady said the Conservatives had failed to “take a risk” and “excite the Conservative vote”.

“They started reducing taxes with the National Insurance cuts, it wasn’t the thing that was really getting the blood racing in Conservatives around the country, it needed to be something else, probably a more solid and demonstrable offer of the direction that we were going to move in, away from the historically high rates of taxation and spending over many, many years.”

Asked if any Tory leader could have pulled back from Liz Truss, Sir Graham replied: “It was always going to be a very big ask. I thought Rishi knew that. I think one of the remarkable things about him for most of his time as prime minister was he stayed incredibly positive.

“However bleak the news was, however bad the polls were, he always had a spring in his step. But he must have known how hard it was going to be.”

Sir Graham Brady, the former chairman of the 1922 Committee, is in conversation with The Telegraph’s The Daily T podcast:

Conservative HQ will never again impose one-person shortlists for MP candidates, Tom Tugendhat has pledged.

The Tory leadership candidate said that constituency associations should be able to put at least one local candidate on their shortlists.

Mr Tugendhat also accused the party hierarchy of being “Stalinist” in its approach to members, asking for donations and not sufficiently taking their views into account.

Genevieve Holl-Allen has the story

Main Hall

• 9:30 In conversation with Jeremy Hunt
• 9:50 Member debate: Immigration
• Member debate: Free speech
• Member debate: Building homes
• Member debate: Growing the economy
• 14:00 In conversation with Tom Tugendhat + Q&A
• THEN In conversation with Kemi Badenoch + Q&A

Fringe Events

• 10:45 In conversation with Michael Gove
• 11:00 The Daily T live with Graham Brady
• 12:00 James Cleverly at the Conservative Policy Forum Hustings
• 12:30 Liz Truss in conversation with Tim Stanley
• 14:00 PopConversation with Robert Jenrick
• 15:00 Onward in conversation with James Cleverly
• 20:30 The social justice hustings with all four leadership candidates

“The trap to fall into, and it is a trap, is to think that as people get fed up with the Labour Government, and judging by the last 12 weeks that’s starting to hapen far more quickly than people were expecting, is to assume that people were automatically come back to us.

“We were trounced at the election. We got ourselves into a position where people looked at the problems the country faced, the problems in the NHS, the cost of living crisis, immigration, and they began to think we were part of the problem, not part of the solution.

“That is very uncomfortable. I know, everyone in the room knows, we faced the most enormous global challenges… We took tough and difficult decisions to get the country back on track. But it doesn’t work just to tell that to the electorate, we tried that at the election.

“We now have to earn their trust and show we have listened… If we follow a narrow political strategy, people will think we’re thinking about ourselves rather than about the country.”

Jeremy Hunt said the Tories “have to recognise we were beaten fair and square in the election” and “have to think like an opposition”.

“All I would say is when you think like an opposition, the reason that the electorate change their mind and decide having thrown you out they want to trust you again is if they can see that you are advocating proper solutions and not always the easy solutions.

“So I think it’s very important that as we embark on this new chapter that we don’t always jump on the easiest bandwagons, because the electorate are watching quickly.

“If there is a principled case to make that the decisions Labour are making will damage our economy then of course we should make that case… I think that sadly every Labour government in history has left with unemployment higher than when they came in. I think if they do what Angela Rayner wants, that will happen again with this government.”

Jeremy Hunt told Tory conference: “The difficult thing that we need to reform, which is also very good for the economy and very good for society, is to tackle the problems that we have in our welfare state.

“And in particular the fact that we are signing off 80,000 people a year who we say are not just too ill to work, they’re too ill even to consider looking for work, so they are automatically signed off…

“My worry about the last 12 weeks is that Labour have got themselves so badly burnt with the mess they’ve got into over winter fuel allowance is that welfare reform will now become untouchable for them.

“If they worried about a battle with the Labour Party on benefits paid to pensioners, including wealthier pensioners, you can imagine what a challenge it would be to cut the bill for working age, disabled people, which is due to increase by £25 billion a year over the next five years. It’s a huge, huge increase.

“But the argument the Conservatives are making is if you do have mental health issues, one of the worst possible things is to be signed off, having to look for work, because that means your isolation is likely to increase, your mental health problems are likely to get worse.”

Jeremy Hunt said Labour was shying away from difficult decisions.

“The real concern I have is since July 5 when Labour came into office, they have talked about difficult decisions. Actually, they have not taken those difficult decisions, they’ve spent all the airtime attacking their predecessors.

“Now we lost that election, we accept that we’ve got a lot of learning to do, we’ve got a long journey to go on. But governing is about doing difficult things and making the arguments for those things.

“And about that, we have heard nothing. And when it comes to the big decisions we need to secure our economic growth for the future, I think people are beginning to wonder whether Labour has a plan at all because we have had absolutely nothing in the 12 weeks when they’ve been in office.”

Asked if he agreed with Labour that things would get worse, Jeremy Hunt said: “They will get worse if Labour makes catastrophic mistakes in the Budget and hikes up tax in a way that destroys growth.

“And I think one of the biggest lies we’ve had since Labour came to office is this nonsense about having the worst economic inheritance since the Second World War.

“I note not a single independent economist has been prepared to come forward and back up Rachel Reeves in that claim. And the reason is very straightforward. I mean inflation, two per cent, jobs, a succession of Conservative governments that created 800 jobs for every single day that they were in office.

“And growth, it wasn’t just the fastest growth in the G7 when Labour took over, but the International Monetary Fund said over the next six years we are projected to grow faster than France, Italy, Germany or Japan. That is a legacy I would have died to have when I became chancellor.

“I think the economy has got very solid foundations. My worry is that Labour believes its own propaganda and starts taking a whole series of decisions, particularly on things like capital gains tax, which have a massive impact in deterring investment in the economy which we really need.”

Jeremy Hunt, the shadow chancellor, is set to speak in the main hall in about five minutes as part of an ‘in conversation with…’ event.

Mr Hunt was a key figure in Rishi Sunak’s administration and at the heart of his government’s efforts to drive down inflation.

This from the polling guru just now on Times Radio:

Keir Starmer has never been a popular politician. He wasn’t popular in the run up to the election. He got a bit of a boost having won the election, his ratings went up, surprise, surprise, but they’ve gone down pretty quickly… This is simply the re-emergence of a problem that was firstly clear.

What are the problems? Well I would pick out two. One is that he is not very good at setting  a narrative, frankly he shares that weakness with Rishi Sunak. And the question is whether any of the four candidates for this party can come with a narrative.

The second is that his political antennae are weak. He’s not very good at spotting problems before they hit him. We saw that when he admitted Natalie Elphicke to the parliamentary Labour party, the former Conservative MP for Dover and Deal.

And immediately the question that was always going to be asked was ‘what about Diane Abbott?’ and it took them a long time to realise they needed to deal with Diane Abbott’s suspension.

The two-party system may have “effectively died a death” at the general election, Professor Sir John Curtice said.

“The first thing about the 2024 election is that the big parties could no longer assume that the contest is simply between them,” the political professor told Times Radio.

“It’s perfectly obvious, in the case of the Conservative example, that while yes, they need to get back around the one in eight people who switched to Labour from them, they also need to get back the roughly one in four who switched to Reform.

“All parties now are going to have realise that 2024 may be the election in which the two-party system effectively died a death.”

The scale of the challenge facing the Conservative party is “very, very considerable”, Britain’s foremost polling guru has warned.

Professor Sir John Curtice told Times Radio the lack of name recognition of the four remaining Tory leadership hopefuls may make it harder for the party to rebuild.

“The party is being asked to choose between four candidates and none of whom is particularly well known by the wider public, indeed not even particularly well known by the diminishing number of people who actually voted Conservative in July.”

Grant Shapps defended his warnings of Labour winning a “super-majority” during the general election campaign.

The former defence secretary was the first then-cabinet minister to break ranks and suggest it was inevitable that Sir Keir Starmer would win big at the ballot box.

Mr Shapps told Times Radio: “I just think, in politics, rather than… I just try to answer the question. If you are so obviously in a position where things aren’t going to plan, then to pretend ‘no, no, no, don’t worry’…

“It’s no great mystery what I was warning of. I was warning of what happened in the end, which was a very, very large unchallenged Labour majority, and that’s what this enormous majority gives them.”

Mr Shapps added: “Just answering the questions sometimes I think is the best policy”.

Grant Shapps was asked about the rise of Reform UK at July’s general election.

“People were saying, look, I’m not voting for them their policies, I’m voting for them because you guys just haven’t got your act together,” he told Times Radio.

“Or, as I said in my concession speech – door after door, people said you guys can’t agree with each other and we can’t agree to vote for you.”

Mr Shapps added: “It was obviously incredibly frustrating, but also completely true. And the first rule of politics in my view, of public life, is if you want to represent people, be competent, that is the number one rule.

“And if the Government itself or the party isn’t agreeing with each other, then it can’t do that.”

Grant Shapps, a former Conservative MP who held multiple cabinet posts in the last government, said he felt “a bit of everything” now he was out of office.

“Kind of being out of those roles is a little bit demob happy – you get on with your life, you don’t have to get up every single day and follow a particular structure,” Mr Shapps told Times Radio.

“But on the other hand, the Conservative Party just went up to a catastrophic defeat… I’m a Conservative through and through.

“I just think to avoid repeating the mistakes of the past, you’ve got to get your act together quickly, got to learn your lessons. And that’s why I’m at this conference launching Conservatives Together.”

Mr Shapps said he had done research showing that if one per cent of registered voters who did not vote backed the Tories there would be a hung parliament, and if two per cent broke for the Tories they would have won the election.

Both Kemi Badenoch and Robert Jenrick had a “difficult day” yesterday, a leading polling expert and Conservative peer said.

Lord Hayward told Times Radio: “Kemi had a difficult day yesterday, I think Robert Jenrick had a difficult day yesterday with an interview on Sky where Trevor Phillips put questions to him about receiving donations from a tax haven and he couldn’t explain it.

“So I think there are two that definitely had a difficult day yesterday. I think in the case of Tom and James, they probably had better days, because they’re not the subject of conversation…

Tom Tugendhat on an actual soap box with Tom Tugend-box written on it. Part of the crowd is his adoring fans, the rest are people who couldn’t get through because it blocked the throroughfare from the entrance pic.twitter.com/xJGwS8fFC3

— Dan Bloom (@danbloom1) September 29, 2024

“But also, and these are impressionistic, looking around the conference centre, I happened to pass one of Tom’s meetings and he actually had to go outside and stand on the soapbox to address the people who couldn’t get in.

“And James, I understand it’s just the luck of the draw, there is no question where his stand is is the best situated.”

There is a “sense of relief” at this year’s Tory conference after their election defeat and Labour’s difficult start in government, Lord Hayward has said.

The Tory peer and polling expert told Times Radio: “I think [there is] a sense of relief, because there has been the disaster in terms of the election.

“But there’s been surprise in that, to be honest, the first few weeks of the Labor Party’s government has been a disaster for them.

“The plunging opinion poll ratings of Keir Starmer, rows over freebies, cronyism and all those sorts of things.

“And the net result is that they’re actually picking up council by-election seats in all sorts of places, which a few weeks ago they wouldn’t have done.”

The interim Conservative chairman has said there will be “no change” to the timetable of the Tory leadership contest.

The race to replace Rishi Sunak will run until Nov 2, when the winner of a head-to-head members’ poll between the final two candidates will be announced.

Richard Fuller told Times Radio: “We had this debate some months ago. We had a very long discussion between the voluntary party and the 1922 Committee.

“The 1922 Committee wanted a longer campaign, they wanted to have four candidates here at conference. And the logistics of that mean that when we whittle it down two, and it goes to the members, there’s a period of time.

“It’s my job to make sure that members have enough time to get their ballot papers and return that ballot papers, and that’s why we ended up at the time frame again.”

The Tory Party will “get behind” its new leader, the interim party chairman has insisted despite the start of party conference being marred by in-fighting.

“There’s a commonality of understanding that whichever person is selected to be leader, all the rest of the party want to get behind that leader.

“One of the pieces of feedback I received, not only from voters but also from party members subsequent to the election is that the last parliamentary party looked divided.

“It looked like we were just focusing on what’s all about me, not on what we need to do to deliver for the public.

“And so all the candidates believe that whoever is selected we’re going to get behind as part of the united team to hold this Labour government to account for the choices it’s making, such as cancelling winter fuel payments for pensioners.”

Robert Jenrick will claim that the Conservative Party will “die” unless it proposes pulling Britain out of the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR), writes Ben Riley-Smith.

In a speech at a rally at the Tory conference today, Mr Jenrick, the front-runner in the party’s leadership race, will further harden his rhetoric on immigration.

He will warn that Nigel Farage’s Reform party will “grow and grow and condemn us to obscurity” unless the Tories somehow regain trust on bringing down numbers.

The warning is Mr Jenrick’s latest attempt to put the UK’s membership of the ECHR at the centre of the leadership contest.

Read the full story here

Tory leadership rivals turned on Kemi Badenoch yesterday after she suggested maternity pay was “excessive”.

Speaking during a morning media round in Birmingham, Mrs Badenoch said regulations around the benefit have “gone too far” and were tying business in too much red tape.

She said families needed to take more “personal responsibility” over their finances when they have children and suggested working people were paying too much in tax to fund statutory maternity pay.

The remarks were quickly rejected by other contenders, with Tom Tugendhat saying he wanted to see “strong maternity and paternity pay”.

Daniel Martin has the full story here

Kemi Badenoch told James Cleverly to “dream on” after the shadow home secretary claimed he was the “best” of the four remaining Tory leadership candidates.

At a reception on Sunday night, Mr Cleverly declared “I would be the best leader of the party”, saying he had the most media experience and had held two great offices of state.

Mrs Badenoch, the shadow housing secretary, began her speech by saying: “Nice speeches, boys, but I think you all know I’m the one everyone’s been waiting for.”

She added: “We are going to get Angela Rayner, we’re going to get Rachel Reeves and we’re going to get Keir Starmer and to do that we need someone who’s going to cut through, somebody who is going to stand up to them and also face down Farage.

“Somebody who will resonate with the public. James thinks he’s the best – dream on, James. If you want change, vote for renewal, vote for Kemi.”

Dominic Penna, The Telegraph’s Political Correspondent, guiding you through the second day of the annual Conservative Party Conference in Birmingham.