CONSERVATIVE Party leader Kemi Badenoch has said that she agrees with criticism from Lord Robertson about Sir Keir Starmer’s stance on defence and claimed that Labour has become “the welfare party”.

She told GB News: “I agree completely with Lord Robertson. He is saying what I have been saying now for months, that Labour has become the welfare party.

“I actually met him in December, long before this war in Iran started. He talked to me about the Strategic Defence Review and how we should be working cross-party. I have been asking Keir Starmer to do that, even yesterday, I said, ‘Let’s work together to find the money’. You know what? He said, ‘No, thanks’. He is not interested.

“All they care about is welfare. We have come up with ideas for how we can get to 3% by the end of this Parliament. We talked about repurposing the wasteful Net Zero project money. There’s about 17 to possibly 50 billion in there.

“We talked about putting the two-child benefit cap back on, use that money to get 20,000 soldiers, 6,000 regulars, 14,000 reservists.

“I hope the Prime Minister will work with me. I don’t think he is interested. But the fact that a former Labour Defence Secretary, a former Secretary General of NATO, is having to criticise his own party shows just how bad they are, and it’s not just them.

“He also said that he asked to meet with the leader of Reform and the leader of the Liberal Democrats. None of them took up this offer to understand the Strategic Defence Review. I did and my shadow cabinet did, because we are serious people. We want to get this country working again.”

She also condemned President Trump for posting a messianic image of himself on social media.

“I’m married to a Catholic. I have three Catholic children,” she said. “I can tell you that image did not go down well in my household.

“It was so bizarre. I think it’s been deleted now. President Trump is not someone who I think has ever apologised.

“But if those are the sorts of things that random people do as jokes, that’s not what the President of the United States should be putting out. I strongly, strongly disagree with it.”