Cleverly backs replacing BBC licence fee with subscription model and says he will accept gifts if made Tory leader– UK politics live

Badenoch claims we have stopped seeing business as a producing entity. Instead people see it as a random thing that people do that produces tax.

She wants to change that, she says.

But she says she is not talking about policy now. She explains:

We need to end what I call governmentitis, which is this belief that we’re going to be in government very soon.

She criticises the national service policy that was announced in the election. It was thrown out without any preparation, she says.

I was extremely frustrated because I don’t like policy that just floats without being anchored. You haven’t been talking enough about citizenship, you haven’t been talking enough about patriotism. You haven’t been talking enough about belonging, about community.

So just throwing out national service because someone said it in the focus group and it polled well – that it was a policy that nobody really cared about.

The national service policy was also criticised in the confernce hall this morning. See 1.01pm.

Badenoch says politicians are too afraid of criticism.

Sometimes you have to deal with the stuff now. Sometimes you have to walk through the fire to get to the place that you’re going to, and what I see is actually a lot of MPs just being afraid of not being right, being scared of the mob – the online mob …

I’m prepared to have difficult conversations now, and I don’t care what people say. If we as conservatives buckle every time we get criticism, you’re not going to get anything done.

Nelson puts it to Badenoch that she likes a fight.

Badenoch says she does not choose to have a fight. But if she has to have a fight, she is willing to do that. And she makes sure she wins, she claims.

Nelson says Badenoch claims she was misquoted over the maternity pay issue. But she seems to get misquoted a lot, he says.

Badenoch claims that is what happens to conservatives. She repeats the point about Margaret Thatcher she made in the conference hall yesterday. And she goes on:

Whoever wins this competition is going to get misrepresented or misquoted. It is a conservative thing.

But the difference is that if they are misrepresenting our values, when I am leading, I will make sure that I come up and defend us. I’m not going to apologise to the BBC or the Guardian or any of the leftwing media or press.

Nelson asks about the essay Badenoch released last night. (See 10.24am.)

Badenoch says the average Tory association is full of what she thinks of as the old middle class – people who produce things.

But now the middle class is full of people who work in bureaucracy. She explains:

It’s people who rely on government. It’s not just civil service or people who work as equality, diversity and inclusion instructors. It’s also people who need the government in order to make money.

That happened to me when I worked in banking, I went into tech, building things, and I had to move into compliance, working out regulations, because that’s where the promotions were.

An extreme example of this is a hotelier that I met just after Covid, and I said ‘My daughter working hotels. This must have been the worst time ever.’ And he said, ‘Kemi, I’ve never made so much money in my life. My hotel is full of asylum seekers.’

This is not producing. This is people living off government.

Kemi Badenoch is about to speak at a fringe meeting organised by the Spectator. She is being interviewed by Fraser Nelson, the outgoing editor.

It should be a friendly audience. In Blue Ambition, Lord Ashcroft’s biography of Badenoch, Nelson is quoted as saying that in 2022, when Badenoch first ran for leader, he had to impose a limit on how many positive articles the website could run about her – because so many of his contributors were huge fans.

Nelson is being replaced as Spectator editor by Michael Gove, the former levelling up secretary, who at one point was seen as one of her biggest supporters at the top of government.

The room is packed, and people were queuing at least an hour before to get in.

During the Q&A on the conference stage earlier, James Cleverly, the former home secretary, claimed “dozens” of asylum seekers would have been sent to Rwanda by now under the Tory deportation scheme if the election had not been held in the summer.

Asked if the policy would have worked, he said:

I reckon at this point we could have sent dozens of people to Rwanda.

It’s not just about the people that you sent to Rwanda, because ideally you don’t want to be receiving people in the UK and sending them to Rwanda, you want people to stop coming to the UK.

He compared the plan to the success of the agreement with Albania, which saw illegal arrivals from the country drop by 90%.

The deal that we had with Albania … we didn’t need to send very many Albanians back to Albania before the message cut through ‘Don’t waste your time and money trying to get to the UK, because all they do is kick you out again’. That’s what would have happened once we got Rwanda up and running.

Tom Tugendhat has escalated his criticism of Robert Jenrick over Jenrick’s claim that human rights law means special forces are having to kill terrorists, not capture them (see 8.46am), suggesting his rival knows “nothing about” sensitive military matters.

Speaking at a fringe event, Tugendhat said:

It is an extremely serious allegation and without very specific examples it would be – I think – irresponsible to [say that] …

If you present a legitimate military threat to the United Kingdom, then we have under the laws of armed conflict today a legal ability and in fact a military capability to conduct operations to keep the British people safe.

I am afraid that is simply a fact, and if you don’t know it please don’t comment on military matters you know nothing about.

Cleverly says he thinks the date of the end of the leadership contest should be brought forward so the new leader can respond to the budget. He says the budget will be a defining moment for Labour, and the new leader should be opposing it.

Q: So, if you make the final two, will you go to Richard Fuller, the party chair, to say the contest should be shortened?

Cleverly says it is “when” he makes the final two.

On the basis of what he has said, if he and Robert Jenrick make the final shortlist, the CCHQ will come under strong pressure to have a rethink. Kemi Badenoch, who is not in favour, would no longer be relevant to the decision. (See 2.44pm.)

UPDATE: Cleverly said:

I have already said to the party board that I would prefer that we nibble away a couple of days from the leadership [election] … I want to get at them at the first possible opportunity.

This budget will define this Labour party. If we hit them hard, where it hurts, in their economic incompetence that will be a good starting point for the new leader of the party.

Cleverly says he is in favour of changing the BBC licence fee.

He says the BBC should move to a subscription model. It has “a back catalogue of some of the best television in the world”, he says.

UPDATE: Cleverly said:

I had a delegation from the BBC come along to me and say, when I was a new MP, and they did the usual thing: ‘Oh, because of the unique way the BBC is funded ya-ya-ya.’

And I said to them, and I said to them at the time, this was back in 2015, I said ‘if I were you, at the next renegotiation of the licence fee, I would start your planning to become a subscription service.

‘You have a back catalogue of some of the best television in the world’. If Disney and Netflix can make money on the subscription model, the BBC should, because the bottom line is, in the era of streaming services, the tax to watch television is an unsustainable business model.

And that back catalogue of content that we have already paid for, why don’t we make sure that when China obsesses about Peppa Pig – apparently Peppa Pig is very popular in China – and other content, that they pay for it rather than demanding that we pay for it all over again?