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Kemi Badenoch has become the latest Conservative Party MP to enter the leadership race to replace Rishi Sunak.
The shadow housing secretary has pledged to tell voters the truth as she launches her campaign to become party leader.
The announcement comes as former Home Secretary Suella Braverman announced she had withdrawn from the race because the “traumatised” party refused to acknowledge the truth about why it lost the general election.
Ms Braverman said she had secured the support of the 10 MPs needed to cross the threshold to enter the race.
But she added that she had chosen not to run for the party leadership after being “vilified” for her views on why they suffered such a drastic loss in the July 4 general election.
Ms Badenoch, a former business and trade secretary in the last government, becomes the sixth Conservative MP to enter the leadership race.
James Cleverly, Tom Tugendhat, Robert Jenrick and Mel Stride all declared their intention to run last week, while Ms Braverman’s predecessor Priti Patel announced she would run this weekend.
“It is time for renewal,” Badenoch wrote in an editorial for The temperature. “The country will not vote for us if we do not know who we are or what we want to be.
“That is why I am seeking the leadership of the Conservative Party to renew our movement and, with the support of the British people, to make it work for our country again.”
In a thinly veiled reference to Boris Johnson, the shadow housing secretary added that it was time for conservatism to become a “team effort” again.
She writes: “In recent years, we have placed our trust in the talents of a single person. Those days are over.”
“Presidential politics is not working in the UK. Conservatism must become a team effort again as we renew our party from the ground up.”
She added: “My campaign is launched with an explicit goal: to renew our party by 2030 — the first full year we can return to government and the first year of a new decade.
“We will renew our approach from the ground up: we cannot control immigration until we reconfirm our belief in the nation-state and its sovereign duty, first and foremost, to serve its own citizens.
“Our public services will never fully recover from the pandemic until we remember that government must do some things right, not everything wrong.”
In his withdrawal letter published in The telegraph, Ms Braverman said a significant portion of the party refused to acknowledge why it lost the election.
Ms Braverman said the party had failed to reduce immigration despite promises to do so, had raised taxes to a 70-year high “while promising otherwise” and had “overreacted” to the coronavirus pandemic.
“It is not pleasant to accept these truths,” she wrote. “I have tried to expose them and have been vilified by some colleagues. But that is how it is. Whoever leads our party must accept them, or else he will have to prepare for a decade in the wilderness.”
