Clear battle lines drawn by Kemi Badenoch as she says the next election will be a ‘battle for the soul of the nation’

Clearly defined battle lines have been drawn across the Westminster political divide following Kemi Badenoch’s speech at the Tory Party Conference.

While Prime Minister Andy Burnham put reform of social care at the heart of his pitch to Labour faithful last week, the leader of the Conservatives made abolishing inheritance tax on all “family homes” and allowing couples to leave behind an additional £1m tax-free the centre of her pitch to her party.

The Tory leader said the next election will be a “battle for the soul of the nation”, distinguishing her party from Labour’s approach by promising to focus on letting people “keep more of what they earn” if it returned to power.

Badenoch also said opening Brexit negotiations would be a "terrible idea", hitting out at Burnham's pledge to bring the UK closer with Europe.

She told the Conservative Party Conference “can you imagine having to go through that again”.

In comparison to the Labour Party Conference last week, the Tories had a relatively quiet event. Badenoch’s job up until this point has been to shore up a party that was rudderless and taking on water.

Now she must chart a course to electoral victory. While her speech at the conference yesterday marked out the policy territory the Tory party would look to occupy, Badenoch has a lot of work to do in convincing the electorate that the Conservatives have changed under her leadership.

At the same time, the spectre of Nigel Farage’s Reform UK continues to lurk in the background. Various recent missteps from Reform UK have enabled the Tories to put some distance between them.

Badenoch used her conference speech to hit out at her former colleague Suella Braverman, who suggested that only white people can be English, accusing Reform of wanting to “debate whether my mixed-race children are English”.