Kemi Badenoch has refused to kick former prime minister Liz Truss out of the Conservative Party.
The Tory leader suggested such a move would be “neither here nor there” for voters’ perception of the party.
In a speech on Thursday, shadow chancellor Sir Mel Stride sought to distance the Conservatives from Ms Truss’s mini-budget, saying the party needed to show “contrition” to restore its economic credibility.
In a furious response, Ms Truss accused Sir Mel of having “kowtowed to the failed Treasury orthodoxy” and being “set on undermining my plan for growth”.
Asked by the BBC on Friday whether she would consider throwing former prime minister Ms Truss out of the Conservatives in a symbolic break with her short-lived, turbulent time in No 10, Mrs Badenoch replied: “Is she still in the party?”
Ms Truss, the former Conservative MP for South West Norfolk, is understood to be a Tory party member still.
Speaking to the BBC, Mrs Badenoch said: “What is really important is what Mel was saying yesterday. What he was saying was that the mini-budget did not balance. It wasn’t tax cuts, it was the … £150 billion of spending increases on energy bills that did not make sense.”
Pressed whether she believed the mini-budget had damaged the Conservative brand, Mrs Badenoch said: “Well, look at what happened, people didn’t understand why we had done that, and so our reputation for economic competence was damaged.”
When asked again why she would not consider kicking Ms Truss out of the party, the Tory leader said: “It is not about any particular individual. I don’t want to be commenting on previous prime ministers.
“They’ve had their time. What am I going to do now? Removing people from a political party is neither here nor there in terms of what it is your viewers want to see.”
After insisting Ms Truss was not in Parliament anymore, Mrs Badenoch said her party needed to “focus on how we’re going to get this country back on track”.
“What we have right now is a Labour Government, it’s Keir Starmer. We need to stop talking about several prime ministers ago and talk about the Prime Minister we’ve got now and what he’s doing to the country,” the Tory leader said.
Ms Truss this week appeared in a video to promote the Irish whiskey brand of bare-knuckle fighter Dougie Joyce, who was once jailed for attacking a 78-year-old man in a pub in 2022.