Victoria Atkins had little patience for the row engulfing her party leader when she spoke with GB News.
Kemi Badenoch has been forced to retract a claim that Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni warned her against striking a pact with Reform UK, and the Shadow Environment Secretary was asked, bluntly, how such a mess had happened.
“I don’t know the details of that,” she said. “But what I do know is that in both Ms Meloni and in Kemi, we’ve got two fantastically strong women leaders. And on a day when we’re rightly commemorating the memory of another amazing force of nature, Dolly Parton, may she rest in peace, I just think: let these women run their countries, run their parties and get on with it.”
Pushed on whether she genuinely knew nothing about a story that had dominated coverage the day before, Ms Atkins didn’t budge. “I genuinely obviously have read the reports, but I do not know any more than that,” she said, adding that she’d spent the day working in her Lincolnshire constituency rather than following Westminster gossip. She pointed instead to Ms Badenoch’s record as business secretary, including signing the UK’s accession to the CPTPP trade deal, and said the relationship between the two women was longstanding. Beyond that, she said, it was a question for the party’s press office rather than her.
It was a swift end to a story she plainly wanted to move past. What she wanted to talk about was money: who was and wasn’t willing to spend it, and on what.
Ofgem had just announced a 4 per cent rise to the energy price cap from October, taking bills to their highest level in three years. Ms Atkins called it evidence of a broken promise, recalling former Labour leader Ed Miliband’s pledge to cut bills by £300. “What a broken promise this is,” she said. “It is outrageous. It’s also deeply serious for people who do not know how they’re going to be able to pay their bills.” Households, she said, were instead facing rises of around £400.
She singled out constituents who rely on heating oil, saying many had used the winter fuel allowance to cover the upfront cost of filling their tanks, support she said Labour rarely even acknowledges. “This Labour government never talks about heating oil,” she said. And it wasn’t only households feeling the pinch, she argued: businesses in her constituency were “struggling to pay the energy costs and the taxes hiked by this Government”, with some considering closing altogether. “It just lends itself to this doom loop of misery that this Government seems to have put us in as a country.”
Her prescription was to scrap VAT and carbon taxes on electricity, while stripping out what she called the “net zero obsession with levies on our bills”.
She made the same argument about defence funding, and here the conversation turned personal. Asked about warnings that Russia could retaliate against Britain over its support for Ukraine, Ms Atkins said the threat had to be “taken extremely seriously”, while insisting Labour was failing to back that seriousness with money.
“Labour have got to get serious about funding defence,” she said, calling on the Government to hit 3 per cent of GDP on defence spending by the end of the Parliament. She argued the Conservatives had already shown how the numbers could work through welfare reform. “We have shown them how they can do this, and we will give them the votes in the national interest to achieve it. But is he prepared to make those tough decisions in order to defend our country safely?”
Ms Atkins represents RAF Coningsby, one of Britain’s two Typhoon bases, and said her constituents do extraordinary things both at home and overseas to defend Britain’s interests.
“My constituents do extraordinary things both at home and overseas to defend our national interests,” she said. “For me, this is personal. I want this Government to put their money where their mouth is and defend our country properly.”
