Badenoch says 10% of civil servants are ‘very bad’ and jokes they are ‘should be in prison bad’ – as it happened | Politics

• Kemi Badenoch has told a fringe meeting that up to 10% of civil servants are “very, very bad”, jokingly adding that they are “should be in prison bad”. (See 6.36pm.)

• Robert Jenrick has almost caught up with Badenoch in terms of popularity with members, a poll suggests. (See 9.37am.)

During the Q&A at the Spectator Kemi Badenoch was asked if she approved of term limits for civil servants, an idea proposed by Vivek Ramaswamy when he was running to be the Republican candidate for president in the US.

Badenoch replied:

I don’t want people to get me wrong – I think that civil servants are like everybody else. They come in to do a job, and I’d say about 10% of them are absolutely magnificent.

And the trick to being a good minister is to find the good ones quickly, keep them close and try and get the bad ones out of your department.

There’s about 5 to 10% of them who are very, very bad – you know, should be in prison bad – leaking official secrets, undermining their ministers, agitating – I have some of it in my department – usually union led.

But most of them actually want to do a good job. And the good ones are very frustrated by the bad ones.

The audience laughed when Badenoch used the “should be in prison bad” line, so she was not being 100% serious at this point. But she may not have been entirely frivolous either, and the comments are likely to reignite her feud with the civil service.

As Pippa Crerar reported in a Guardian exclusive in July, Badenoch had a difficult relationship with officials in her department when she was business secretary because some of them thought she was a bully. Pippa wrote:

Kemi Badenoch, the frontrunner to be the next Conservative party leader, has been accused of creating an intimidating atmosphere in the government department she used to run, with some colleagues describing it as toxic, the Guardian can reveal.

At least three officials found her behaviour so traumatising that they felt they had no other choice but to leave, sources claimed.

Q: What is your view on tuition fees?

Badenoch says she thinks a lot of students are being “sold a pup”. She does not think people should have to have higher debts.

There was meant to be a market, she says, with some universities charging less than others. That has not happened.

She says this is an issue a policy review would have to look at.

Q: So do you oppose Labour’s plan to let tuition fees go up?

Badenoch says the system is broken. She would change it.

If lots of people are going to university, they should be going into graduate jobs.

But lots of them are going into jobs that are not, or did not used to be, graduate jobs. She mentions nurses as an example. They getting a huge amount of debt that they cannot pay off, she says.

She says Labour came into office unprepared for government. The Tories have to start doing their thinking now.

Badenoch ends the event by praising Nelson, saying she does not think the magazine has ever had a better editor.

Nelson says, if a byelection comes up, Boris Johnson might be a candidate. He takes a straw poll of the audience to see if people favour him coming back.

To Nelson’s surprise, the result comes out 3 or 4 to 1 against Johnson returning.

Nelson says, when Johnson’s book comes out, he thinks it will read like a manifesto for Johnson’s return.

Q: How much freedom should local associations get at byelection, choosing candidates?

Badenoch says at byelections associations normally get a choice over candidates.

She says selections get stitched up more ahead of general elections.

It happened to her, she says. When she was selected as MP for Saffron Walden, before the 2017 election, a No 10 aide (Stephen Parkinson) had been lined up for it. He had been told in advice it was likely to become vacant. She got two days’ notice.

Nelson points out that she had already been rejected by one association at that point. He says that Badenoch was put on the list as the London candidate, already rejected by one association, who was expected to be rejected by Saffron Walden, a rural constituency.

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.