‘Michael Gove’s puppet’ Kemi Badenoch criticised for missing Channel crisis summit as Tory party sources claim she turned down Rishi Sunak’s request to accompany him there
A row erupted within the Tory Party last night over claims Business Secretary Kemi Badenoch was getting ‘too big for her boots’.
Party sources claimed that she had turned down the Prime Minister’s request to accompany him and other senior Cabinet Ministers to Paris to attend the summit with French President Emmanuel Macron on Friday.
Mrs Badenoch had been expected to stand in for Chancellor Jeremy Hunt in a meeting with Emmanuel Moulin, director general of the French Treasury. However, it is understood she said that she had ‘business to attend to’ in her Saffron Walden constituency instead.
The claim comes as the former Tory leadership contender is already said to be on a Tory whips’ ‘blacklist’ for not turning up to some of her question sessions in the Commons.
Questions have also been raised in Whitehall over her ‘judgment’ after it emerged that Mrs Badenoch considered hiring Sue Gray – the civil servant in charge of investigating Partygate and who is now controversially trying to become Sir Keir Starmer’s chief of staff – as her permanent secretary at the end of last year.
A row erupted within the Tory Party last night over claims Business Secretary Kemi Badenoch (pictured) was getting ‘too big for her boots’
Last night, a senior source hit out at Mrs Badenoch’s attitude, saying: ‘It is impossible to get her to do anything we ask. She just says no.’
But the claims – along with suggestions she is being ‘manipulated’ by Michael Gove and was considered ‘rude’ by former PM Liz Truss – sparked a blistering response from Mrs Badenoch’s camp.
It’s impossible to get her to do anything we ask
Allies of the Business Secretary, who is also Minister for Women and Equalities, denounced any suggestions that Cabinet colleague Mr Gove, who backed her leadership bid last summer, was now manipulating her as ‘plain Westminster sexism/racism that she can’t be her own woman’.
And a source close to Mrs Badenoch told The Mail on Sunday: ‘Kemi is not just the most senior black woman in Government – she is the only black woman in Government and in the Tory Party.
‘What a shame that just after International Women’s Day there are people trying to say the Business Secretary is getting too big for her boots, yet mysteriously at the same time doesn’t know her own mind and is someone else’s puppet.’
Party sources claimed that Mrs Badenoch turned down the Prime Minister’s request to accompany him and other senior Cabinet Ministers to Paris to attend the summit with French President Emmanuel Macron on Friday
They said that ‘Kemi is targeted because she’s prepared to say what she thinks’, after she defended SNP leadership contender Kate Forbes’s decision to say she would have voted against gay marriage. The row erupted following the French summit and after Mrs Badenoch was not present at Women and Equalities’ questions in the Commons on Wednesday.
Her allies said last night the reason she missed the event was that, until Wednesday, she had been in Israel for trade talks. They pointedly noted that this would help with one of the PM’s priorities – to grow the UK economy.
They also insisted that as she was responsible for both trade and equalities, she had to do more Commons oral questions than other Secretaries of State but has only missed two since she joined the Cabinet.
As for her consideration of Sue Gray, the sources insisted that she was only one of ‘a number of names’ suggested by Mrs Badenoch before she chose another candidate as the best person for the job.
An ally of former PM Ms Truss described Mrs Badenoch as ‘rude’, adding: ‘When Liz was in No 10 she tried to avoid talking to Kemi.’ But friends of the Business Secretary asked whether it wasn’t ‘more rude’ for people close to Ms Truss ‘to brief this out’.
