Kemi Badenoch appears to have found the party responsible for making a pig’s ear of Brexit as she urged her colleagues to “accept our mistakes”.
The Conservative Party leader took aim at her predecessors for mishandling the UK’s split with the European Union, saying leaving the customs union without a growth plan was a “mistake”.
A committed Brexiteer, Badenoch voted for both Johnson and Theresa May’s Brexit withdrawal agreement after becoming an MP in 2017.
She also served as a minister under her three Conservative prime ministers – Boris Johnson, Liz Truss and Rishi Sunak.
In pre-released extracts of the speech, the Tory Party leader said the public “will never trust politicians unless we can accept our mistakes”.
“I will acknowledge the Conservative Party made mistakes,” she is due to say.
Badenoch has not named who she holds responsible, but in her speech will say: “We announced that we would leave the European Union before we had a plan for growth outside the EU.
“We made it the law that we would deliver net zero carbon emissions by 2050. And only then did we start thinking about how we would do that.
“We announced that we would lower immigration, but immigration kept going up.
“These mistakes were made because we told people what they wanted to hear first and then tried to work it out later.
“That is going to stop under my leadership. If we are going to turn our country around, we’re going to have to say some things that aren’t easy to hear.”
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