Former business and trade secretary Kemi Badenoch attacked independent MPs elected on a pro-Gaza platform as she launched her campaign to be the next leader of the Conservative Party.
Speaking to activists and the press, she criticised what she described as “malign and destructive identity politics”.
“When everyone was talking about the five new MPs from Reform [Nigel Farage’s party], I was far more worried about the five new MPs elected on the back of sectarian Islamist politics; alien ideas that have no place here. The sort of politics we need to defeat and defeat quickly,” she said.
Several Labour MPs described the intimidation they faced from pro-Gaza campaigners throughout the general election campaign.
Labour’s Jon Ashworth, who lost his seat to pro-Gaza independent Shockat Adam, told radio station LBC: “I have never known a campaign of such vitriol, such bullying, such intimidation built on the foul obnoxious lie that I was responsible for genocide. That I had the blood of Gazan children on my hands.” He also described how he was forced to take shelter in a vicarage.
The JC also revealed that Iqbal Mohamed, an independent MP elected in Dewsbury and Batley, urged people at a rally to boycott and throw away brands that had been “supporting Israel and Zionism”.
Badenoch’s choice of venue, the Institute for Engineering and Technology next to the banks of the River Thames in London, was deliberate.
“Right now, this country desperately needs an engineer,” she said.
“Engineers fix problems. We do tough stuff… A bridge built to the wrong spec comes tumbling down … we know how to build systems that work.
“I want to help rebuild the party, rewire the state, reboot the economy and make it go places … We need to renew the Conservative Party so it can solve the problems that will plague the next decade.”
One of the problems she identified was the growth in authoritiarian regimes threatening democracies across the world, including Iran: “When Taiwan is under threat from China, when Israel is under threat from Iran, when Ukraine is under threat from Russia, we need to ask ourselves if we are ready for this dangerous new world.
"We cannot rely on laws from the 1950s or assumptions from the 1980s; we need to renew our thinking.”
The leadership contender also criticised her own party, saying that “we ended up mired in scandal, unable to deliver on our promises and fundamentally distrusted”.
She added that “the British public are yearning for something better – and this Labour government is not it. They have no ideas. At best they are reannouncing this we have already done. And, at their worst, they are clueless, irresponsible and dishonest.”
A video introducing Badenoch featured a number of Conservative Party members and activists, including former Norwich North Parliamentary candidate Charlotte Salomon, who is Jewish.
Salomon told the JC: “I think Kemi is the leader who will renew our party in a way that revitalises our grassroots, repairs relationships with supporters and take us back into government after being the robust and capable opposition we need to be here and now.”
She added: “In 2018 she agreed to meet me in Parliament to listen to my concerns surrounding antisemitism.”
Badenoch is one of five other candidates vying to succeed Rishi Sunak as Conservative Party leader. Other candidates are former, former foreign secretary James Cleverly, former home office minister Robert Jenrick, former home secretary Priti Patel, former work and pensions secretary Mel Stride and former security minister Tom Tugendhat.
These six will become four after a ballot of Conservative MPs will knock out two candidates with the least support.
