Kemi Badenoch launches Tory leadership bid as Suella Braverman withdraws from contest

Kemi Badenoch has become the latest Conservative Party MP to enter the leadership race to replace Rishi Sunak.

The shadow housing secretary pledged to tell voters the truth as she launched her bid to become leader .

It comes as former home secretary Suella Braverman announced she had pulled out of the race because the “traumatised” party was refusing to acknowledge the truth about why they lost the general election.

Ms Braverman said she had secured the backing of the 10 MPs required to get her over the threshold to enter the race.

But she added she had opted not to try for the leadership of the party after being “vilified” for her views on why they suffered such a drastic loss in the 4 July general election.

Ms Badenoch, formerly the business and trade secretary in the last government, becomes the sixth Tory Party MP to join the leadership race.

James Cleverly, Tom Tugendhat, Robert Jenrick and Mel Stride all declared their intentions to run last week, while Ms Braverman’s predecessor Priti Patel announced she was running over the weekend .

“It is time to renew,” wrote Ms Badenoch in an op-ed for The Times. “The country will not vote for us if we don’t know who we are or what we want to be.

“That is why I am seeking the leadership of the Conservative Party to renew our movement and, with the support of the British people, to get it to work for our country again.”

In a thinly veiled reference to Boris Johnson, the shadow housing secretary added it was time for conservatism to become a “team effort once again”.

She wrote: “In recent years we’ve placed our faith in the talents of one individual. Those days are over.

“Presidential politics don’t work in the UK. Conservatism must become a team effort once again as we renew our party from top to bottom.”

She added: “My campaign is launching with an explicit focus on renewing our party for 2030 — the first full year we can be back in government and the first year of a new decade.

“We will renew by starting from first principles: we can’t control immigration until we reconfirm our belief in the nation state and the sovereign duty it has, above all else, to serve its own citizens.

“Our public services will never fully recover from the pandemic until we remember that government should do some things well, not everything badly.”

In her withdrawal letter published in The Telegraph, Ms Braverman claimed a significant portion of the party was refusing to acknowledge why they lost the election.

Ms Braverman said the party had failed to cut immigration despite making promises to do so, had raised taxes to a 70-year high “whilst pledging the opposite” and had “over-reacted” to the coronavirus pandemic.

“It’s not comfortable accepting these truths,” she wrote. “I’ve tried to set them out and been vilified by some colleagues. But it is what it is. Anyone who leads our party needs to accept them or else prepare for a decade in the wilderness.”