Robert Jenrick has accused Kemi Badenoch of telling “a pack of lies” about her meeting with the Italian prime minister, Giorgia Meloni, as he launched a deeply personal attack on his former boss.
The Reform UK MP sought to heap pressure on the Conservative leader amid confusion about whether Meloni had used a meeting in Rome with Badenoch to urge her to “be her own woman” and resist doing a deal with his party.
A Conservative spokesperson denied the party had suggested the Italian leader made such comments after the Times initially reported she had. This was later removed from the newspaper’s report.
Jenrick described the leader of his former party as a fantasist. “It was obviously very, very embarrassing for Kemi Badenoch. My advice, if you go and visit a foreign leader, is don’t make up a pack of lies about what they say,” said Jenrick, who defected to Reform this year after losing out to Badenoch in a leadership contest.
The Tory leader met the Italian leader for an hour in a cafe in Rome on Monday morning and used a post on X afterwards to praise the handling of the Italian economy by Meloni, whose own Brothers of Italy party is under pressure from a new rival.
A spokesperson for Badenoch denied the Conservatives made any false claims about the Meloni meeting, saying Reform was “just making things up” and “peddling conspiracy theories to distract [people]”, going on to refer to the £5m gift the Reform leader, Nigel Farage, received from the Thailand-based businessman Christopher Harborne.
Jenrick said: “As regards Kemi, look, we could tell she was making it up. She lives in a fantasy of her own making. She made up that she got a degree offer from an American university for her CV, she claims she is going to be the next prime minister. There is a lot of fantasies going on at the moment in Kemi’s life.”
The university comment was a reference to a previous claim that Badenoch had received an offer from Stanford University at the age of 16, which became the subject of controversy after former admissions staff said she had described an impossible scenario.
Both Jenrick and Badenoch featured in fresh claims this week that she had plotted with fellow Conservative cabinet ministers to remove Rishi Sunak as prime minister months before the general election.
After Jenrick resigned as immigration minister in 2023 over the details of Sunak’s plan to deport asylum seekers to Rwanda, a new book by Anthony Seldon alleges, Badenoch discussed telling him she would resign from the cabinet if he did not amend the policy, with some people recounting she “had promised she would ‘take him out’”.
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Jenrick was speaking at an event in London where he announced a raft of polices including plans to scrap Britain’s existing data protection laws and widen a tax-relief scheme for investors in small businesses in the UK in an attempt to allow relatives to claim advantages more easily.
People who are on hold on calls to HMRC for more than half an hour would get a £30 credit off their tax bill under Reform, Jenrick pledged, as he also announced plans to scrap the mandate that requires all new car and van sales to be zero-emission by 2035. “Let white van men choose the vehicle that they want to drive for their businesses,” he said.
Reform was attacked by Labour over plans to replace GDPR with a “light-touch” privacy law modelled on New Zealand. “Robert Jenrick can’t say which important data safeguards he would scrap and whether it would put people’s personal details at risk. He’s making it up as he goes along,” said a Labour spokesperson.
