Kemi Badenoch has rejected Sir Keir Starmer’s accusation that she and Reform UK leader Nigel Farage have been “talking the country down”.
The Conservative Party leader said she and her party were talking the Prime Minister himself down.
“We’re not talking the country down, I am talking Keir Starmer down because he is doing a terrible job, and everyone can see that,” she told reporters during a visit to a house in Redhill, Surrey.
Sir Keir had told the Mirror newspaper: “While Reform and the Tories talk down the country at every turn, we’re doing the work to make people’s lives better.
“I’m not interested in scaremongering from the sidelines.”
Mrs Badenoch continued: “What I need to do is show people the Conservative Party has changed.
“There were mistakes made by the previous Conservative government, I am changing policy, like I’ve done with net zero.”
Mrs Badenoch has committed the Tories to extract as much oil and gas as possible from the North Sea, and will use a speech in Aberdeen on Tuesday to set out her plans.
She will announce that the Tories plan to completely overhaul the North Sea Transition Authority (NSTA), which oversees the issuing of licences, dropping the word transition and giving it a simple order to extract the maximum possible amount of fossil fuels.
On Monday, she repeated that she thinks reaching net zero under current plans is “impossible”.
She said the Conservative Party “needs to show that it is on the side of the people of this country”.
“Net zero, as it currently stands, is impossible. We cannot bankrupt our country.
“We need to get our energy out of the ground rather than importing oil from Norway, who are drilling in the same basin – that’s not doing anything for the environment.”
