Labour in Government is not just incompetent but cruel, according to Kemi Badenoch. Sir Keir Starmer and Rachel Reeves have been running the country for less than a year but the 45-year-old Conservative leader says the harm to the country is worse than she feared.

"Yes, we knew they would be bad but they are worse because there's a cruelty to what they are doing rather than just an incompetence," she says.

Kemi points to the changes in inheritance tax which farmers warn will devastate agriculture.

"The family farms tax is a cruel thing to do because they are going after people they think can't fight back and will never vote for them," she says.

This is not the only shock she has experienced since succeeding Rishi Sunak as Tory leader in November.

She says she expected in the wake of Labour's landslide "nobody would be listening to us or looking to us for answers". But she claims Labour's popularity has sunk to such depths people across the nation are asking: "Well, what are you going to do about this?"

"I didn't believe Labour could be genuinely this bad," she says.

The Conservatives will face their biggest electoral test on her watch this week when council and mayoral elections take place across England. Election experts such as Tory peer Lord Robert Hayward expect a drubbing with her party losing 475 to 525 councillors.

Kemi says voters on the doorstep are "not as angry with us as they were last year," adding: "I know it's still going to be a challenging election result but they are very angry with Labour, that's for sure."

She urges voters not to make a protest vote, saying: "When you look at what Labour has done - snatching away winter fuel payments - it's time to send them a message and the best way to send them a message is to vote Conservative. If you vote Reform you'll probably just let Labour in by splitting the Conservative vote."

When Kemi looks four years into the future to the next Westminster election, she says she worries how "big the mess they're leaving will be".

"Labour is the biggest danger facing the country because they are occupying space in government without a plan which means that everything now that isn't great is going to get worse," she says.

Her disdain for Sir Keir was on display last week when she faced him for the first Prime Minister's Questions since the Supreme Court ruled that under equality law a woman is defined by biological sex. The Tory leader urged the PM to apologise to Rosie Duffield, whom she says was "hounded" out of the Labour party for "telling the truth" on this issue.

"This is a man who believes that he is always right; that everyone is wrong," she says. "There is a pomposity to him.

"He never answers any questions; he just thinks that these things are beneath him...

"If you have someone running the country who thinks that it's his way or the highway, that everything he does is right, then that means that when he's doing the wrong thing he will not course-correct."

Despite her admiration for Ms Duffield, she does not want the now-Independent MP to join the Conservative ranks.

"Rosie is a fantastic person," she says. "I think she is great.

"I enjoy her company. She is very funny.

"But she is not a Conservative. I'm not one of those people who's just trying to get the numbers up; this is how we end up with problems later.

"I want Conservatives in the Conservative party."

She wants to avoid a return to the "infighting" which rocked her party for years as different factions vied for control and toppled leaders.

Kemi also counsels voters against backing Nigel Farage's party because they find him entertaining.

She warns: "Entertainment does not fix your roads, entertainment does not look after children with special educational needs; it doesn't find money for adult social care. What we're voting for is who is going to be running local services.

"And across the board Conservative councils deliver better services for lower taxes."

She sees an array of long-term threats facing the country, including a potential collapse in food security.

A farmer recently told her that British agriculture is in a similar situation to the crisis-wracked steel sector. As young people quit farming and families sell off land there is the danger "all of a sudden one day we'll wake up and we can't produce food".

"That's something I'm determined to fight," she says.

She is concerned Energy Secretary Ed Miliband's push for net zero carbon emissions will result in more pylons appearing across the countryside.

"Net zero will bankrupt us unless we change course and actually start delivering cheap abundant energy," she says. "We need to look after our environment but we can't look after it if we're bankrupt."

The mother of three is also worried about the falling birth rate, which the Office for National Statistics reported dropped in 2023 to to its lowest level on record for England and Wales with just 1.44 children per woman.

She says: "We are becoming an older society... We need people to work longer and be healthy longer; we need them to have more children."

Relying on migration for growth, she continues, has had "devastating" consequences.

Nearly 33,000 people have come to the UK on small boats since Labour won the election and Kemi insists numbers would be radically lower if the scheme to send migrants to Rwanda for processing had not been axed.

She says: "We need a third country deterrent... It's a relatively new problem and that's why we needed something radical and new to deal with it...

"Labour has made the problem worse. They are making everything worse."

Warning of the harm caused by Labour hiking up employers' National Insurance, she says: "You look at what Labour has done with the jobs tax. It's killing businesses."

Kemi is not optimistic about Sir Keir's attempt to "reset" relations with the European Union.

She states: "When Labour negotiates, Britain loses...

"Labour and the Lib Dems are just trying to take us back to where we were 10-20 years ago but the world has changed. We need to think about the future, not the past."

Kemi is preparing for the Westminster election when she will ask voters to entrust her with Britain's future and bring the curtain down on Starmerism. And if the Conservatives can do better than expected in this week's local contests, Tories will look to that day with new ambition.