Badenoch once resisted the “culture warrior” label, insisting during her successful leadership campaign she didn’t like to fight – but was willing to fight to defend conservative principles.

Her “culture warrior” words came in a speech at a dinner hosted by the International Union for Democracy, a global alliance of center-right parties.

She said she believed in tradition, adding “if we don’t defend our culture, who will?”

She said she also believed in freedom – the free market, free speech, free enterprise, freedom of religion, “trusted institutions under the rule of law and equality before the law, no matter who you are or where you come from.

But liberalism has been “hacked,” socially and economically, by left-wing politicians, Badenoch argued.

“I fear that we are losing what made our countries great,” she said.

Badenoch, who became Conservative leader last month, said “opposing ideologies” were taking over and undermining the culture and institutions that had created space for them.

She accused the left of using “narratives of oppression” while being “not very interested in ethnic minorities except as a tool to fight their battles against the right”.

Anti-racist groups, she said, were deciding that all white people were racist and were campaigning against “white privilege.”

The environmental movement, she added, has been taken over by “radical green absolutism” around net zero.

Feminism, she laments, “no longer knows what a woman is”.

She called on conservatives to fight back, defending “muscular liberalism” and curbing “the growth of activist government.”