‘I WAS interrupted,” insists Kemi Badenoch, when asked on stage at the Conservative party conference to explain her comment that maternity pay was “excessive” and had “gone too far”.

Apparently she was answering a different question, just steamrolling her way through the interview with no regard to what she was being asked at any given point.

It was interesting, though, that when asked once again very specifically about maternity pay, she could only bring herself to call it “quite important”.

Perhaps, at the end of the day, she doesn’t care an awful lot what Conservative Party members – or anyone else – think about her stance on that particular issue, or business regulation more broadly.

READ MORE: How to subscribe to The National for £10 pounds on our 10th birthday

Maybe all she cares about is the fact that people are talking about her, rather than her opponents in the Tory leadership race.

Listening to Badenoch being interviewed by Chris Hope of GB News, I lost count of the number of times she trumpeted her ability to “cut through” with plain speaking and hammer home her “first principles”, while swatting away softball questions about further details as relating to “micro-policy”.

Audaciously, she seized the opportunity to compare herself to Margaret Thatcher, arguing that her infamous assertion of there being “no such thing as society” was “cut down into a soundbite that was used to attack her”. This was certainly the argument made by Thatcher herself in her memoir The Downing Street Years.

Badenoch (below) tells us that the follow-up statement, “there are only individual people, and families”, was a “very good explanation” of what Thatcher meant, herself snipping off the rather more important parts about personal responsibility.

It’s a shame Badenoch was too busy “cutting through” to dwell on the full context of the comment, which was made in 1987 in a Women’s Own interview.

Thatcher rather extraordinarily seemed to suggest that children, among other people, should stop complaining to the government about being homeless: “I think we have gone through a period when too many children and people have been given to understand, ‘I have a problem, it is the government’s job to cope with it!’ or, ‘I have a problem, I will go and get a grant to cope with it!’ ‘I am homeless, the government must house me!’ and so they are casting their problems on society and who is society?

“There is no such thing! There are individual men and women and there are families, and no government can do anything except through people, and people look to themselves first.”

One might hope a shadow housing secretary, at a time of housing emergency, would wish to distance herself from this notion of homeless people unreasonably bleating for help, but the chance for Badenoch to compare herself to Thatcher was apparently too tempting to resist.

There’s little ambiguity to these statements too: “Maternity pay varies, depending on who you work for – but statutory maternity pay is a function of tax, tax comes from people who are working. We’re taking from one group of people and giving to another. This, in my view, is excessive.”

It seems Badenoch wishes us to note that there is no “society” standing ready to fund maternity pay for working women who wish to have children – only other “people who are working”. The implication seems to be that pregnant women should think twice about the burden they place on others.

Badenoch herself did just that, according to an unauthorised biography by Tory peer Lord Ashcroft.

It says in 2016 she opted to resign from The Spectator when she became pregnant with her second child, rather than go on maternity leave, out of what then-editor Fraser Nelson described as a loyalty to the magazine and “a sense of decency”.

Would that we could all afford to be so decent! Unfortunately there are only so many plum political roles and investment banker husbands to go round – as by this point Badenoch had been elected to the London Assembly on an annual salary of £56,269, thanks to two previous Tory members becoming MPs at the 2015 General Election.

In dizzying contrast to her maternity pay comments, she also seems to believe that would-be parents in less comfortable circumstances are wrong to feel anxious about the financial impact of starting a family.

“Some people feel that they can’t afford children,” she told a Conservative Women’s Organisation fringe event on Mondayyesterday. “I often think that too many people are worried about the money more than they need to be.”

READ MORE: Andrew Bowie defends Kemi Badenoch over maternity pay comments

Incredibly, she went on: “We need to give people confidence. People are scared to have families, they’re worried about whether they can afford them.”

No wonder people are worried, amid soaring costs – and when supposedly serious politicians are suggesting the maternity pay to which they are entitled is too generous. No wonder they lack confidence, when they hear that their baby-making is bringing down small businesses.

There is no consistency here. Badenoch may be “cutting through”, but she’s making little sense.