Q: [From Peter Walker from the Guardian] Yesterday you backed what Nick Timothy said about the Ramadan event in Trafalgar Square. What was your objection to it? Yesterday your party said it was a segregation matter. This morning the party chair, Kevin Hollinrake, said it was a general point about prayer in public. But in an article this morning Timothy said this was a specific point about Islam. What is the party’s position?

Badenoch says they are both right.

She says the Tories believe in freedom of religion.

But this debate which Nick is having is not about freedom of religion. It is about how religion is expressed in a shared public space, and whether those expressions fit within the norms of British culture.

She says Keir Starmer pulled out of an an event organised by the group that organised the Trafalgar Square event when he was opposition leader because they are “highly controversial”. He was “sucking up” to British Jews. So his stance is “the mother of all hypocrisy”, she says.

She says Timothy is a ‘“fantastic shadow justice spokesperson”.

She says, as a woman from an ethnic minority, she is “very uncomortable seeing women pushed to the back in Trafalgar Square in an event which is exclusionary”.

She says she is happy to see religious events in Trafalgar Square. But they have to be inclusive.

(Although this Badenoch is claiming that the Tories primarily objected to the Trafalgar Square prayer event because it involved gender segragation, Timothy did not mention this at all in his original tweet attacking the event as “an act of domination”, or in a subsequent defence of his stance.)