The case of Austrian sex offender Josef Fritzl caused Kemi Badenoch to lose her faith in God, the Conservative leader has said.
In an interview with the BBC, Mrs Badenoch said she was “never that religious” while growing up but “believed there was a God” and “would have defined myself as a Christian apologist”.
But this changed in 2008 when she read reports that Fritzl had imprisoned and repeatedly raped his daughter, Elisabeth, in his basement over 24 years.
Mrs Badenoch, whose maternal grandfather was a Methodist minister, said: “I couldn’t stop reading this story. And I read her account, how she prayed every day to be rescued.
“And I thought, I was praying for all sorts of stupid things and I was getting my prayers answered. I was praying to have good grades, my hair should grow longer, and I would pray for the bus to come on time so I wouldn’t miss something.
“It’s like, why were those prayers answered and not this woman’s prayers? And it just, it was like someone blew out a candle.”
But she insisted that while she had “rejected God”, she had not rejected Christianity and remained a “cultural Christian”, saying she wanted to “protect certain things because I think the world that we have in the UK is very much built on many Christian values”.
During her interview, which is due to be broadcast on Thursday evening, Mrs Badenoch also said her tenure as Conservative leader was going “well”, adding her job was to “make sure that people can see that we are the only party on the centre-right”.
In an apparent dig at Nigel Farage’s Reform UK, she said: “There are pretenders. We’re the only party on the centre-right, and we’re the only ones who still believe in values like living within our means, personal responsibility, making sure that the government is not getting involved in everything so it can focus on the things it needs to look at, like securing our borders.”
She went on to defend previous comments saying the fact she had worked at McDonald’s made her working class, saying: “I had to work to live.
“That, for me, is what being working class is. It’s the lifestyle that you have. You have to work, to survive.”
And she argued that parents who were “worried about their children getting stolen or snatched” had created a younger generation that lacked the “resilience” to deal with problems in life.
Responding to figures suggesting a quarter of people aged 16-24 said they had a mental disorder, Mrs Badenoch said: “I think they think they have a mental disorder, I don’t think they all have a mental disorder.”
She added: “I’m not a medical expert so it is not my expertise on exactly what we need to do to get them into work, but we should be trying to get them into work.”
