Kemi Badenoch says she will have opposite approach to Labour on economy

She was also critical of her predecessor Rishi Sunak’s leadership, saying he had lost trust with voters because “promises on immigration and on tax were not kept and that is something that we need to change”.

Badenoch resigned from Boris Johnson’s cabinet over his handling of the Chris Pincher affair, which she said resulted in the public thinking “we were no longer speaking for them or looking out them, we were in it for ourselves”.

But in regards to the Partygate scandal, she said Johnson walked into “a trap”.

“A lot of the stuff that happened around Partygate was not why I resigned – I thought it was overblown,” she said.

“We should not have created fixed penalty notices… that was us not going with our principles.”

When asked to apologise for the economic turmoil under Liz Truss, Badenoch said she wanted to “draw a line” under the faults of previous leaders and refused to go through a “post-mortem” of every Conservative leader “for the past 14 years”.

Instead, Badenoch said her focus was on rebuilding trust and creating a perception of unity within the party, although she said that was “very tricky”, particularly when “not everybody wants to serve”.

She added: “The public didn’t trust us for a whole bunch of reasons – not keeping promises but also looking disunited.”

Addressing the loss of Conservative voters to Reform UK, led by Nigel Farage at the last election, Badenoch denied she would only be offering voters “more of the same”.

She said: “Nigel Farage and the success of Reform are a symptom of the Conservative party in my view, not being clear enough and consistent enough about values and about how we were using those Conservative values to deliver to the British people.

“If we get this right, then I think people will start to see that Reform is nothing but a spoiler for the Conservatives and just creates more and more Labour government.”