UK politics live: Badenoch warns of Tory leadership ‘stitch-up’ as Johnson reveals ‘nuts’ vaccine raid plan

Dazed, confused, but with more than a hint of defiance (foolish or otherwise), the Conservatives meet for their party conference in Birmingham with some important business to transact.

The members and MPs will see a great deal of the four remaining leadership candidates, and naturally there will be much discussion about what went wrong for the party in the general election (and before). Robert Jenrick is now the bookies’ favourite, having overtaken Kemi Badenoch, with James Cleverly and Tom Tugendhat the outsiders – but that could all change.

The official theme is “Review and Rebuild”, which sounds about right. Given their fratricidal tendencies, however, and the spectral presence of Boris Johnson through the medium of his memoir Unleashed, it could easily descend into acrimony. The Tories may not be too relevant right now, but it will be entertaining...

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Former prime minister Boris Johnson believed he “might have carked it” when he was in intensive care with Covid without the “skills and experience” of his nurses, according to an extract of his memoir.

Mr Johnson spent several days in intensive care with Covid in April 2020. In the extract of his Unleashed book published in the Daily Mail, he described not wanting to fall asleep on his first night in intensive care “partly in case I never woke up”.

He also recalled feeling “rotten” with “guilt” and “political embarrassment” in the days before he was admitted to hospital.

The nurses caring for Mr Johnson on his first night in intensive care were “Jenny from New Zealand and Luis from Portugal,” he recalled.

Following his release from hospital, the then prime minister spent some time at Chequers with his now-wife Carrie, and he recalled joining in with the clap for the NHS on a Thursday evening.

Immigration has so far featured heavily in the leadership campaign, with frontrunner Mr Jenrick making it a centrepiece of his campaign and arguing the party’s defeat was because it broke its promises on immigration.

In an interview with the Daily Telegraph on Saturday, he said he wanted to “put Nigel Farage out of business” and described Reform as “a symptom not a cause”.

He said: “It exists in its current state because my party failed. We made promises on issues that millions of people…small ‘c’ conservatives like me, care passionately about, like controlled and reduced immigration, like securing our borders, and we didn’t deliver on those promises.”

Britons have been urged to leave Lebanon amid warnings the country faces a humanitarian “catastrophe” following the latest round of Israeli air strikes.

On Friday, the Foreign Office warned that British nationals should “leave now” as series of massive explosions levelled multiple apartment buildings in Beirut.

In a statement, the Foreign Office said it was “working to increase capacity” and secure seats for British nationals on flights out of the country.

In his own address to the UN on Thursday, the Prime Minister said: “I call on Israel and Hezbollah. Stop the violence. Step back from the brink.

“We need to see an immediate ceasefire to provide space for a diplomatic settlement and we are working with all partners to that end.”

Kemi Badenoch has hit back at criticism that she took a holiday with her family during the start of her campaign, saying that her husband and children are the “most important thing”.

She apologised to members for being unable to make the event in Yarm, north Yorkshire, as a result of long-standing family commitments in August.

“I heard from members who were there saying they didn’t like that,” Badenoch says. “So I don’t mind if other candidates have a pop at me because they’re showing more about themselves than they are about me. I’m a family person. My family is the most important thing.

“If my husband called me now and said, ‘I don’t want to do this any more, you need to pull out of this leadership contest’, I’d say OK. Because without him I can’t do this. Without my children and my husband my life doesn’t really have any meaning.”

Donors and businesses are turning their backs on the Tories for Labour and Nigel Farage’s Reform UK as the party enters its conference with question marks over its finances.

Insiders have told The Independent that a number of red flags have been raised in preparation for the first annual conference since the historically poor general election defeat in July.

In the weeks before the conference in Birmingham, set to get underway on Sunday, it was claimed that the party was still struggling to find a sponsor for its VIP blue room, previously sponsored by the retail company Regent Street Group.

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The Conservative Party has “failed to see the threat from the Liberal Democrats” while focusing too much on Reform, Theresa May has warned.

Writing in The Times ahead of the party’s annual conference in Birmingham, Baroness May said the remaining candidates for the Tory leadership could “play into Reform’s hands” by failing to understand why they lost the general election.

The former prime minister said the Conservatives lost power in July not due to policy, but because the party had “trashed our brand”, losing its reputation for “integrity and competence”.

Blaming the Partygate scandal and Liz Truss’s mini-budget, Lady May added the Tories had spent “too long tacking to the right in order to appease potential Reform voters” and “forgot that we are not a right-wing party but a centre-right party”.

Lady May compared the Conservatives’ strategy to last month’s 1,500m Olympic final in Paris, in which Norway’s Jakob Ingebrigtsen was too focused on defeating Britain’s Josh Kerr that he allowed American Cole Hocker to come through on the inside and take gold.

She said: “Just as Ingebrigtsen was focused on Kerr and failed to see that his action against him would open up other threats, so the Conservative Party has been focused on Reform and failed to see the threat from the Liberal Democrats – losing 60 seats to them at the election.”

Kemi Badenoch has hit out at Rishi Sunak’s critics who attepted to undermine him during the final months of his premiership, describing it as “appalling”

“Starting the New Year with people talking about a ‘grid of shit’ to undermine Rishi, ‘We’re going to cause all these problems so he has to resign’, in the year we were most likely to have an election … that is unforgivable,” she told The Times.

She revealed that she had been approached by those plotting to remove him but rebuffed them, before taking aim at Robert Jenrick, who was one of Sunak’s most ardent critics.

“The difference between Robert and me is that my resignation was my lowest moment and his resignation was his highest moment,” she says. “In the hustings he tells people that it was his resignation that showed why he should be leader, whereas my resignation was, for me, a sign that our party was fragmenting.

Both Badenoch and Jenrick are due to lay out their vision for the future of the Conservatives over the following days at the party’s annual conference.

After returning to parliament, MPs will whittle down the four candidates to a final two, with members voting for their new leader soon afterwards.

Tory leadership hopeful Kemi Badenoch has warned that members will be “very angry” if MPs orchestrate a “stitch-up” to keep her out of the final two.

Allies of the North West Essex MP have claimed her campaign is the victim of “dirty tricks”, which has seen her competitor Robert Jenrick accused of lending votes to James Cleverly.

Speaking to The Times about the support she has received from voters, Badenoch said: “But really what I think that they’re saying is less that they want a chance to vote for me, but that there is no stitch-up. They want a real competition. And if the MPs try and stitch it up, I think the members will be very angry.”

She recalled: “It happened in 2019, where the Boris [Johnson] camp played around with votes to make sure that they got the person they wanted to be up against. And it can happen. I don’t know whether there’s enough of us for it to happen.”

Asked if she believed Jenrick was attempting that approach, she said “that may be happening”, but added that a number of MPs were tactically voting for friends or to repay favours.

Scottish Conservative leader Russell Findlay has said his new deputy leader will “play a key role” in changing the party.

Mr Findlay, who comfortably won the contest to succeed Douglas Ross as the leader of the Scottish Conservatives, appointed MSP Rachael Hamilton to the post.

She takes over from Meghan Gallacher, who had stood against Mr Findlay for the party leadership and resigned as deputy partway through the campaign.

Ms Hamilton, the MSP for Ettrick, Roxburgh and Berwickshire, said she was “privileged” to become deputy and “excited” to be part of the party’s new leadership team.

It is Mr Findlay’s first appointment since becoming party leader on Friday, and he said he was “delighted” Ms Hamilton would be deputy leader.