Kemi Badenoch has said she does not believe Elon Musk is going to make a multimillion-pound donation to Reform UK, even as the party’s treasurer claimed the US billionaire was now ready to do so.
The Conservative leader also said that it did not matter if Nigel Farage’s party received money from Musk amid speculation that he could donate as much as $100m (£79m) – because she would match it.
“I believe in competition so I think that if Elon Musk is giving a competitive party money then that is a challenge for me to make sure I raise the same,” she told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme.
Badenoch was speaking as Reform’s new treasurer, Nick Candy, claimed that the owner of Tesla and X was among several billionaires who were ready to fund the party.
Candy has promised “political disruption like we have never seen before” as he claimed to have several other billionaire backers in addition to Elon Musk.
Candy told the Financial Times Reform would raise more funds than “any other political party” for grassroots campaigning, data and polling.
However, Badenoch said of Musk, who was pictured meeting Farage and Candy at Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida earlier this month: “I do not believe that he is going to give that money, but it doesn’t matter if he does because it is a challenge to make sure that we can raise the same.”
Asked about defections to Reform from the Conservatives, she said that Andrea Jenkyns, the former Tory minister who recently defected to Farage’s party, did not “like me”, it was “very personal” but “I don’t really care”.
“There are loads of other people who do like me. It’s politics. Some people will, some people won’t … There’s this great song by Baz Luhrmann that you know, remember compliments you receive, forget the insults, called Everyone’s Free to Wear Sunscreen. That’s sort of how I try and live.”
Badenoch also said it was going to take time for her to rebuild the Conservatives after the party’s disastrous general election performances and predicted that next year’s local elections could be difficult.
“The last time we had a conservative defeat it took us 13 years to come back and we have fewer MPs than we did then. We also have a challenge on the right,” she said, adding that it “did not work” when the Tories rushed out policies in 1997.
“The public did not kick us out because they did not like our manifesto. They kicked us out because they did not trust us.”
Badenoch said she did not have as much time as she would like to change the Conservative party but said the “revolution” she was aiming for was a “marathon, not a sprint”.
“Four years even in my view is not enough time to do what we want to do, which is a revolution in terms of how the state works and how our society functions. It is built for the 20th century and we need to change that.”
She added: “We’re going to have milestones, things like local elections and so on, which are going to be very difficult.”
The Conservative party has been stagnant for some time in polls, where it sits on 26.1%, just 2% above when Liz Truss stepped down as prime minister. Reform UK has tended to sit close behind, although one poll earlier this month put it in second place, ahead of Labour.
