Kemi Badenoch claims that Tory party infighting has ended and leadership is going well – UK politics live

Good morning. The Radio 4 news is leading on a story about an interview with Kemi Badenoch in which she announces that she has not got anything to announce. Welcome to the Christmas holiday news desert.

To be fair, there is some proper news happening relating to domestic politics this morning. Revised growth figures are out and they say the UK had no growth at all in the third quarter of the year (July, August and September). As Richard Partington reports, for a new government that has made boosting growth a priority, this is a setback.

The growth figures came out after the release overnight of a report from the CBI saying firms are predicting a sharp fall in business activity in the new year. Some of the rightwing papers, like the Daily Mail, have splashed on the CBI story.

All of which is quite a big deal – and Graeme Wearden is covering it in detail on his business live blog.

It also presents an opportunity for the Conservative party. But, in an interview with Amol Rajan from the Today programme, recorded in advance but released this morning, Kemi Badenoch defended the fact that the opposition does not have a fully worked-out policy programme. She said the next election was probably a long way off, and she said it was important to take time working out a platform.

Here are two of the from the interview broadcast at 8.10am on the Today programme. A longer version is being released on the Today podcast.

I think it is going well. I think it’s going as well as it possible could do. I was expecting it to be much worse.

And one of the things that I’m really pleased about is that the party has sort of downed tools on the internecine warfare, and the actual being in parliament and seeing a real Labour government reminds everyone who the real opponent is.

• She rejected claims that she should be setting out more policy now. She said she did not think there would be an early election, and she claimed that when the Conservatives announced lots of policy soon after their defeat in 1997, that turned out to be a mistake. She said:

In 1997 what we did was rush out with a whole bunch of things that we’re going to do it: save the pound, do this, do that, kick every barking dog. It did not work.

As an engineer, you have to look at the problem that you are trying to solve.

The public did not kick us out because they didn’t like our manifesto. They kicked us out because they did not trust us. … We need to explain why we didn’t deliver. We need to re-earn that trust.

Earning trust is not something you do with a few tweets, rushing on television and getting on Instagram. That’s not what you do.

Building trust is something that takes a while.

A lot of people assume that, because Labour are unpopular, that they will fall soon. I don’t think so.

People are used to the drama of the Brexit years, changing prime ministers every couple of years. I even sometimes stumble on comments when you’re reading an article, ‘They should have got rid of him by now.’ It’s it’s been six weeks [since she became leader – although it actually is seven weeks].

She also said commentator should accept her party it was “a marathon, not a sprint” for her party.

I don’t have as much time as I would like. Four years even in my view is not enough time to do what we want to do, which is a revolution in terms of how the state works and how our society functions.

It is built for the 20th century and we need to change that. However, simply building a castle in the sand is not going to work either. My view is that I don’t have very much time but I have lots of things that need doing.

• She said she was not bothered about people disliking her. Asked why the former Tory MP Andrea Jenkyns defected to Reform UK, she said it was because Jenkyns did not like her. Asked why that was, she replied:

Honestly, I don’t really care. There are loads of other people who do like me. It’s politics. Some people will, some people won’t … There’s this great song by Baz Luhrmann that you know, remember compliments you receive, forget the insults, called Everyone’s Free to Wear Sunscreen. That’s sort of how I try and live.

Reform is saying stuff because it hasn’t thought it all through. You can give easy answers if you haven’t thought it all through.

I do the thinking and what people are going to get with new leadership under me is thoughtful Conservatism, not kneejerk analysis.

Here is a clip from the interview. I will post more from it when I have heard the full version.

We have got a Downing Street lobby briefing at 11.30am, but otherwise the diary is fairly empty.

If you want to contact me, please post a message below the line or message me on social media. I can’t read all the messages BTL, but if you put “Andrew” in a message aimed at me, I am more likely to see it because I search for posts containing that word.

If you want to flag something up urgently, it is best to use social media. You can reach me on Bluesky at @andrewsparrowgdn. The Guardian has given up posting from its official accounts on X but individual Guardian journalists are there, I still have my account, and if you message me there at @AndrewSparrow, I will see it and respond if necessary.

I find it very helpful when readers point out mistakes, even minor typos. No error is too small to correct. And I find your questions very interesting too. I can’t promise to reply to them all, but I will try to reply to as many as I can, either BTL or sometimes in the blog.