Kemi Badenoch tells police leaders who once jeered Theresa May they can trust the Tories again, saying her team's 'bad players' have gone

Kemi Badenoch has urged the police to trust the Tories again, assuring them the ‘bad players’ on her team have now gone.

In a speech to rank-and-file leaders who once jeered Theresa May, the Conservative leader admitted her predecessor had been wrong to cut officer numbers during the austerity years.

She also said she disagreed with the former Home Secretary’s clampdown on stop and search, and made it clear she had never agreed with the widespread claim that police were institutionally racist.

Mrs Badenoch told the Police Federation on Thursday that she was not an MP when its members heckled and booed Mrs May for imposing 20 per cent budget cuts on them during an infamous 2012 speech.

She said that although there ‘wasn’t any money left’ at the time, ministers should not have assumed that ‘because crime is falling, that it's OK to cut police officers’.

‘It was the wrong thing to do, and that's why following governments did replace the number of police officers to get us back to where we were, and then some, a little bit more.’

She went on: ‘But the real question you're asking is, why should you trust us now? Well, I'm asking you to trust me because I'm in charge now.

‘It's like a football team. We're under new management. A lot of the bad players are gone. The public didn't vote for them to come in. There's a new manager. We've got new players.'

And she highlighted her own record, saying: ‘When we had people criticising officers for stop and search, I was always there saying we need to stop and search. If anything, we should be doing more of it. So I disagreed, for instance, with Theresa May's stance on that.

‘When people were saying that the police were institutionally racist, I went out and said, you are not institutionally racist because you are not. I disagreed with that completely.

‘In 2020, when the George Floyd protests were happening and everybody was talking about Black Lives Matter, I stood against all that. I'm on the record. When all of those politicians were jumping on that bandwagon, I stood up for the police and I backed the police.’

Mrs Badenoch added: ‘I've been saying this stuff for many years, even when it wasn't easy to do, even when I was the only one that was saying it. And so that's why you can trust me and the party that I'm leading now.’

But she also told the officers that people see them as becoming a ‘ghost service’ because they are ‘stretched so thinly’, while other families have ‘suffered because of devastating police failures’.

Highlighting the case of Henry Nowak, the student who was handcuffed as he lay dying by officers who refused to believe he had been stabbed, Mrs Badenoch said: ‘We can understand why people lose faith in the police when they’ve watched that video footage of Henry’s last moments.’