Leadership contender’s team in damage control mode after she is criticised for saying burden on business is ‘excessive’

Kemi Badenoch was forced to twice clarify the comments and emphasise that she ‘of course’ believed in maternity pay. Photograph: Jeff Overs/BBC/AFP/Getty Images

Kemi Badenoch’s campaign was in damage control mode on the first day of Conservative party conference, as rival candidates criticised comments she made on maternity pay, saying the burden on business was “excessive” and that people should exercise more “personal responsibility”.

Badenoch, the frontrunner among party members in the four-way contest, was forced to twice clarify the comments and emphasise that she “of course” believed in maternity pay. But the comments were seized upon by other candidates who distanced themselves from Badenoch’s words.

One member of a rival camp said: “Badenoch’s mad remarks are one of the only things that could send our [party’s] approval ratings down even further.”

The former business secretary is popular with the Conservative membership but must survive two more rounds of voting by MPs, where James Cleverly and Tom Tugendhat hope to squeeze her out of the final two against Robert Jenrick.

Badenoch, the shadow communities secretary, said one of the principles she was fighting her Tory leadership contest around was a call for the state to do less.

Asked in the interview with Times Radio if she thought maternity pay was excessive, Badenoch replied: “I think it’s gone too far the other way, in terms of general business regulation. We need to allow businesses, especially small businesses, to make more of those decisions.”

The Tory leadership hopeful was told that the current level of maternity pay was necessary for people who could not afford to have a baby without it. Badenoch replied: “We need to have more personal responsibility. There was a time when there wasn’t any maternity pay and people were having more babies.”

After a significant backlash, Badenoch said she had been misrepresented, saying she did “believe in maternity pay,” posting on X: “Contrary to what some have said, I clearly said the burden of regulation on businesses had gone too far … of course I believe in maternity pay!”

She later released another video on X, saying she did not “shy from difficult topics, but I won’t be misrepresented … Of course maternity pay isn’t excessive … no mother of three kids thinks that. But we must talk about the burden of excessive business regulation otherwise we might as well be the Labour party.”

Jenrick, who has gained the most support from MPs in the run-up to the party conference, used his first big event at the conference to take some swipes at Badenoch, most directly in disagreeing over maternity pay, saying that as a father to three daughters “I want to see them get the support that they need when they enter the workplace”.

The former immigration minister told a fringe event in Birmingham: “I think the Conservative party should be firmly on the side of parents and working mums who are trying to get on.”

Tugendhat described Badenoch at a Tory fringe event as a “powerful voice” and added: “I know it’s incredibly important that women have the ability to choose, perhaps me to tell you whether you go to work and stay at home or what job to do or how many kids to have, that’s none of my business. My business as a politician is to make sure that you have support for choice.”

Cleverly declined to criticise Badenoch directly, saying it was for her to defend.

A Badenoch campaign source hit back at the criticism from rival candidates, saying: “For other leadership campaigns to be seeking to use selective quotes from an interview to score political hits, shows they’re still wedded to the old politics and simply aren’t serious about getting back to government.”

In a veiled plea for unity between the rival camps, the Conservative chair, Richard Fuller, used his speech at the opening of the conference to apologise to Tory members after the party’s historic defeat. “You told us, as voters have told us, that the parliamentary party was divided, that we appeared self-serving and self-indulgent,” he said.

“You told us, as the voters told us, that our policies too frequently lack grip on the issues at hand, and that we had lost sight of the Conservative values that should have been our guide. I was a member of that parliament. I am accountable for those assessments of our performance. I am profoundly sorry to you, the members of the Conservative party.”

Fuller said the party would conduct a “root and branch” review of the election, chaired by the former cabinet minister Patrick McLoughlin, expected to report back before the next Tory leader is elected on 2 November.

Badenoch also attracted criticism earlier in the day for comments where she said “not all cultures are equally valid” when it comes to deciding who should be allowed into the UK, saying she was shocked by “the number of recent immigrants to the UK who hate Israel”.

Asked by the BBC about the comments in the Sunday Telegraph, Badenoch said: “I think that cultures where women are told that they should not work; I would knock on doors … and you would see somebody at the door who says: ‘I can’t speak to you, I will get my husband.’ I don’t think that is as equally valid as our culture.

“It is not all Muslim immigrants,” she told Sky News. “But there are some, those who buy into Islamist ideology, political Islam, they do not like Israel and we need to be able to distinguish between the two. That is why I don’t just use a word that brings so many people into the group.”

Candidates also exchanged barbs on the first day of the conference in Birmingham over whether the UK should leave the European convention on human rights. Jenrick also characterised the idea of trying to reform the convention before deciding whether or not the UK should quit the treaty to speed up the removal of asylum seekers, as espoused by Badenoch, as deeply unrealistic and something that would lead to “decades of terrorists on our streets.”

The only way to remove people swiftly was by immediately leaving the ECHR, he said: “It can’t be reformed. That requires the unanimity of 46 countries. It is a fantasy.”

Party sources have denied they are considering cutting the contest short to allow the victor to respond to Rachel Reeves’s first budget at the end of October, which comes three days before the end of the contest. Jenrick and Tugendhat have called for it to be moved a week earlier.