Badenoch plotted to ‘take out’ Sunak as prime minister before Labour’s landslide election victory, new book claims

Kemi Badenoch “had no respect” for former Conservative prime minister Rishi Sunak and secretly tried to bring him down before the last general election , a new book has claimed.

Ms Badenoch , who succeeded Mr Sunak as Tory leader after the 2024 election, thought he was “rude to her” and wanted to “take him out without being seen to wield the knife”. And, says the book, her disloyal antics contributed to the scale of the Tory election defeat .

They are among the dramatic claims made in a new book about Mr Sunak by Britain’s leading political biographer Sir Anthony Seldon , which is being serialised in The Independent .

Seldon says relations between Mr Sunak and Ms Badenoch had never been warm.

He claims she was covertly involved in a failed bid to replace Sunak in No 10 in 2023 – the year before the election – around the time his government was rocked by cabinet resignations over immigration.

According to Seldon, after meeting Ms Badenoch to reject her call for tougher immigration laws as demanded by rebel Tories, furious Mr Sunak claimed they wanted to provoke him into telling them to “f*** off”, as an excuse to make Tory divisions even worse.

Seldon’s book, Sunak at 10 : The Last Conservative PM? says Ms Badenoch, who was at the time business secretary, backed dissident Tory MPs defying Mr Sunak because, according to one source, “Kemi did not respect Rishi – she thought he was rude to her.”

She told others conspiring against Mr Sunak over immigration that if they got enough Tory MPs to support them she would give him an “ultimatum” – if he refused to back down she would resign from the cabinet in protest, writes Seldon.

“Some plotters were more bullish, insisting she had promised she would ‘take him out’,” he adds.

Ms Badenoch and her team had been “mulling over” triggering a cabinet mutiny against Mr Sunak to force him out since Robert Jenrick, who has since defected to Reform, resigned from the cabinet in December 2023, states Seldon.

She phoned several cabinet ministers asking them “if anyone was interested in changing the captain”.

Her main worry was not Mr Sunak’s fate, but her desire “to avoid the image of wielding the knife”.

Seldon says he was informed by one of Mr Sunak’s cabinet ministers: “Kemi was not well behaved. Her team were agitating.”

An unnamed Tory MP, who is current member of Ms Badenoch’s front bench, told Seldon she was “a menace who orchestrated trouble in the cabinet” when Mr Sunak was struggling to make his mark in No 10.