‘One or more’ Tory leadership candidates ‘inauthentic’, suggests Andy Street

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Louise Thomas

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“One or more” of the candidates for the Conservative leadership has behaved in a way that is “inauthentic” at the party conference, Andy Street has signalled.

The former West Midlands mayor was asked by Tees Valley Mayor Lord Ben Houchen whether he thought “some of the leadership candidates – one or more – are being inauthentic”, to which he replied: “Yes.”

Mr Street, who was voted out as mayor in May and was appearing on Lord Houchen’s podcast The Blueprint, also said that some of the issues that have taken up “airtime” are not what voters in his region care about.

He said that personal leadership qualities have not been talked about “thus far”.

What “needs to be revealed at this conference is who is genuinely authentic, with whom do you actually get what you see? Who is sufficiently confident in their own position to be themselves?” Mr Street said.

“All of those things. And authenticity is the word that sort of sums it up.

“And I do think what is being played out here is revealing some of the answers to those questions.”

Pushed by Lord Houchen on “do you think some of the leadership contenders – one or more – are being inauthentic”, Mr Street responded: “Yes. Yes.”

James Cleverly, Kemi Badenoch, Tom Tugendhat and Robert Jenrick are vying to replace Rishi Sunak as party leader and have been trying to drum up support with colleagues and at the Birmingham conference.

All four hopefuls are due to make a speech to the members on Wednesday morning, in the hope that they make it through to the final two.

Earlier in the session, Mr Street had suggested he did not think he had heard enough on the “bread and butter issues” during their campaigning at conference.

While he said that candidates could not be expected to have detailed policy plans at this stage, he thinks issues that have taken up “airtime” at conference are “not what citizens in this city are exercised by”.

Mr Street explained: “We have heard one hell of a lot about certain issues, and we’ve heard, if we’re honest, a lot about the internal workings of the Conservative Party.

“If I got 100 people on the top of a Birmingham bus today they would actually say ‘Well, what are you going to do about jobs, about housing, about transport, about net zero and what are you going to do about the most important issue of all in this city – the functioning of our health service?’

“And we have hardly heard those things talked about at all.”

He said that “what I really hoped was that this conference would begin to get to those bread and butter issues”, and there would be a chance to see what candidates’ positions on “these key issues” were and who as a leader could come to a detailed position “over time”.

Neither Mr Street nor Lord Houchen have publicly announced who they are backing in the contest, which is due to come to a conclusion next month.