Justine Greening hints at Conservative leadership bid if Theresa May is toppled, saying 'things need to change'

Former education secretary says she 'might be prepared to' run if a vacancy arises

Justine Greening has suggested she may run to replace Theresa May as leader of the Conservative Party.

The former education secretary said “things need to change” as she lamented the Tory party not “showing what it can do for this country”.

She called on the government to do more to boost social mobility, saying it should be treated with the same importance as the NHS and welfare.

Ms Greening, a staunch pro-European, resigned from the cabinet in January after Ms May attempted to move her from the education brief.

Since then she has been a vocal critic of the government’s Brexit plan and has backed calls for a fresh referendum.

Her latest comments follow ongoing speculation about Ms May’s future amid continued unrest among Tory backbenchers.

Calling for ministers to focus more on social mobility, Ms Greening told ITV’s Good Morning Britain: “We need a guarantee on opportunity for people in this country in the same way that we try to give them guarantees on health and guarantees on dignity if they are falling out of work.”

Asked if she was making an early leadership pitch, she said: “Things need to change, don’t they, and I think people need to have some hope for the future, that Britain can be a country that runs differently and more fairly than it does at the moment.”

Pushed on whether she would run if there was a vacancy, the Putney MP said: “I might be prepared to, but I’m more interested in the Conservative Party actually showing what it can do for this country.

“Yes, we spent a lot of time having to fix the nation’s finances but what we now need to do is discover – maybe rediscover – our own mission, which has got to be about how we make sure that young people growing up everywhere in this county have the same access to opportunity and it shouldn’t matter whether they have got parents who are maybe middle class, a bit more sharp-elbowed.

“Talent is spread evenly. The challenge of Britain is that opportunity isn’t. That’s what we have got to fix.”

Ms Greening would be likely to win the support of MPs on the left of the Conservative Party, who are looking for a candidate to back after Amber Rudd, the former home secretary who was widely tipped to run, was forced to resign over the Windrush scandal.

She had been a long-standing advocate of the need to increase social mobility and has criticised the current government for not doing enough.

She told Good Morning Britain: "I'm committed to doing whatever I can to make sure this country, for the first time, is a place where it doesn't matter where you're growing up, you get the same opportunities.

"And I think you have to have the same level of ambition on that as governments in the past have had on creating the welfare state, setting up the NHS.

"We need a guarantee on opportunity in this country."