What have the Tory leadership candidates said about LGBTQ+ rights?
The race to be the new leader of the Conservative Party is under way – and LGBTQ+ issues are likely to be among the talking points of the newly-announced leadership campaigns.
Following Labour’s landslide victory in the general election, former prime minister Rishi Sunak announced he would step down as leader of the Conservatives once arrangements for selecting his successor were in place.
Nominations for the leadership race closed on Monday (29 July) afternoon. Candidates needed the support of 10 MPs – a proposer, seconder and eight nominations – to be considered.
The six contenders have now been confirmed as James Cleverly, Tom Tugendhat, Robert Jenrick, Mel Stride, Priti Patel and Kemi Badenoch.
They will be whittled down to two by Conservative MPs before grass-root party members decide who will become the leader of the opposition in the House of Commons. The result is expected on 2 November – just three days before the US presidential election.
This is who is running for the Conservative leadership and where they stand on LGBTQ+ rights.
James Cleverly
Former foreign secretary Cleverly was the first candidate to throw his hat into the ring, saying he is the person “best placed” to “unite the Conservative Party and overturn Starmer’s loveless landslide”.
As far back as 2005, he wrote a blog post entitled I like marriage, where he voiced his support for civil partnerships.
“I like marriage and I think that in most cases it is a force for good. I also strongly believe in the family, I don’t feel that the two are incompatible,” he said. “Gay marriage takes nothing away from heterosexual marriage and while there will be some civil partnerships which are done for the wrong reasons, the same can be said of straight marriage.
“Best of luck, I say.”
In 2013, Cleverly, then a member of the London Assembly for Bexley and Bromley, created a new blogpost where he linked the previous one and said: “Re-read it and can’t say I disagree with a word of it… it’s nice to know that I still agree with myself.”
In 2019, the MP for Braintree, in Essex, was absent from the House of Commons votes on extending same-sex marriage to Northern Ireland, and three years later he courted controversy for calling on queer football fans travelling to Qatar for the men’s football World Cup to be “respectful” of the host nation’s views on homosexuality, advising them to “compromise”.
When asked by LBC host Nick Ferrari about LGBTQ+ activist Peter Tatchell, who was allegedly arrested in Qatar while protesting against the country’s stance on queer rights, Cleverly said: “I haven’t spoken with the government of Qatar in direct response to Peter Tatchell, but my understanding is that he was questioned.
“I have spoken to the Qatari authorities in the past about gay football fans going to watch the World Cup and how they will treat our fans and international fans.
“They want to make sure that fans are safe, secure and enjoy themselves, and they know that means they are going to have to make some compromises in terms of what is an Islamic country with a very different set of cultural norms to our own.
“One of the things I would say for football fans is: please do be respectful of the host nation… with a little bit of flex and compromise at both ends, it can be a safe, secure and exciting World Cup.”
On trans rights, Cleverly has previously been quoted as saying: “I am a Conservative because I believe in personal choice, personal freedom, personal responsibility, and I think this is the natural evolution of those principles.
“If a sexual predator wishes to enter a toilet to attack a woman, there’s no need to have any recognition or certificate to do so, that can happen already. If that’s what we’re worried about, we should look at ways of protecting women, rather than dance around the issue and try to make an already-difficult issue even more difficult.”
Shadow home secretary Cleverly is seen as one of the more moderate candidates.
Tom Tugendhat
Former security minister Tugendhat previously ran to be party leader after Boris Johnson’s premiership ended.
Announcing his candidacy in The Telegraph, he declared he is “not just running to be the next Conservative leader” but to become the “next Conservative prime minister”.
In 2019, Tugendhat voted in favour of extending same-sex marriage to Northern Ireland but was absent for a subsequent vote on it.
In 2022, after being asked if he believed “trans women are women, and trans men and men”, he replied: “It is one of those debates that demonstrates why we need to move on because it’s really easy to make division where we need unity.”
The MP for Tonbridge, in Kent, has said a “woman is an adult human female” – a dog-whistle phrase often used by gender-critical activists – adding: “That does not mean in any way [that] trans women have any less respect or any fewer rights… we must never take away what it means to be a biological woman but we must respect people who are in a different gender identity.”
More recently, he signalled his willingness to remove the UK from the European Convention on Human Rights.
Robert Jenrick
When former immigration minister Jenrick announced he was a candidate, his campaign manager, Danny Kruger, said the MP for Newark, in Nottinghamshire, had the “energy, temperament and policy agenda to take on our rivals and lead us back to power in five years”.
In 2019, Jenrick was absent for votes on extending same-sex marriage to Northern Ireland. Two years later he said he was “fully supportive” of the first trans MP being elected in the UK.
At the time, he told Times Radio: “We have made a lot of progress in recent years with respect to LGBTQ members of parliament, but Nick Herbert is right to say there isn’t anybody who is trans within parliament at the moment and perhaps that will change in the future.
“He’s right to point out that there are trans members of other parliaments, elsewhere in the world.”
However, Jenrick has also passed comment on trans people’s bodies and what constitutes womanhood. Again speaking to Times Radio, he was pressed on whether you need to have a vagina to be a woman.
“Well, it’s a complicated topic,” he replied. “But I think the point about self-identification is really about the impact on others. You have to be extremely careful when you’re talking about trans people who are self-identifying going into women’s prisons, for example, within school settings, in public toilets.”
And just last year, he made the controversial claim that “balance” is needed when it comes to outlawing so-called conversion therapy, saying he would not want to see parents “criminalised” over the proposed ban.
“We all support the abolition of conversion therapies which are malicious attempts to convince people to live lives outside of their gender,” Jenrick told Sky News.
“So, banning people from doing those kind of courses or interventions is absolutely the right thing. But this is a much more complex issue than perhaps it seems at first glance.
“If you’re a young person who is trans or is thinking through the issues related to trans, it is absolutely right you should be able to turn to your parents or trusted adults for support and advice at that time. And, as a parent, it is absolutely right I could provide that advice and support, without fear of being criminalised or some other sort of sanction.”
Mel Stride
Former work and pensions secretary Mel Stride has been an MP since 2010, holding his Central Devon seat through the 2015, 2017, 2019 and 2024 general elections.
Stride has voted for and against allowing same-sex couples to marry, and opposed extending that right to armed forces personnel outside the UK. He was absent for a vote on extending equal marriage to Northern Ireland.
Priti Patel
Former home secretary Priti Patel has a controversial history with the LGBTQ+ community, with one charity labelling her legacy in government “despicable”.
Patel was criticised for spearheading the Tory Rwanda plan, which human rights groups warned would put vulnerable LGBTQ+ refugees at risk of harm and discrimination, and for the “window dressing” of the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill by expunging the records of people who were convicted of crimes relating to homosexual activity. Among other things, the legislation aimed to increase stop-and-search and surveillance by police, and limit protests.
“It is only right that where offences have been abolished, convictions for consensual activity between same-sex partners should be disregarded too,” she said at the time.
“I hope that expanding the pardons and disregards scheme will go some way to righting the wrongs of the past and to reassuring members of the LGBT+ community that Britain is one of the safest places in the world to call home.”
Patel, whose Witham constituency borders that of fellow candidate James Cleverly, has attacked the trans community, branding police forces as woke for recording crimes by trans women as being committed by women. She has spoken out against trans inclusion in sport saying the “safety of women and girls should never be compromised”, while declining to make misogyny a hate crime.
In 2013, Patel voted against equal marriage and was absent for a vote on allowing that right to be extended to armed forces personnel. In 2019, she was absent for the vote on extending same-sex marriage to Northern Ireland.
She is viewed as being on the right of the party.
Kemi Badenoch
Much like Patel, Badenoch has a troubling relationship with the LGBTQ+ community owing to her former role as women and equalities minister, often being dubbed the “inequalities minister”. She has even taken aim at equalities initiatives.
Again like Patel, Badenoch is seen as being on the right wing of the Tory Party and has been criticised by the LGBTQ+ community for a failure to institute a full, trans-inclusive ban on conversion therapy during her time in government.
She has also frequently aired anti-trans views and taken actions which negatively affect the queer community, including describing trans women as “men”, secretly meeting anti-trans group LGB Alliance and blacklisting countries which allow self-ID.
Another Essex MP, this time for Saffron Walden, Badenoch has tried to crack down on progressive measures such as gender-neutral toilets, and quashing inclusive workplace policies. She has also spoken out against trans inclusion in sport.
Shortly before the general election, she got into a very public row with actor David Tenant after he told her to “shut up” on trans issues, She responded by calling him a “rich, lefty, white male celebrity… blinded by ideology”.
A freedom of information request revealed that Badenoch attended no Pride-related events in an official capacity in 2023.
