Tory tipped as Kemi Badenoch's Shadow Chancellor said minimum wage is a 'burden'

The Tory tipped to be the next Shadow Chancellor has said the minimum wage is a "burden" on business and questioned whether it should be scrapped, the Mirror can reveal.

New Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch is widely expected to choose Shadow Science Minister Andrew Griffith to be her Shadow Chancellor.

But Mr Griffith took aim at the National Minimum Wage (NMW), saying it "burdens business" and was "simply something that legislators pass to make themselves feel good."

Mr Griffiths told the audience of 'Removing the shackles of the state: How to restore personal responsibility', a fringe event organised by the Taxpayers' Alliance, that there was a "question about the state's ability to continue to impose external costs on business."

At the same conference, Ms Badenoch provoked widespread anger by suggesting maternity pay was "excessive" and had gone "too far."

And she too suggested the minimum wage was "overburdening business."

Speaking at a Q&A event at the conference, she said: “There’s a café in my constituency that closed down, and the lady who owned it said, ‘I can’t afford to pay the wages any more. I can’t afford minimum wage. I can’t afford for my staff to go on [paid] maternity [leave]’."

Removing the NMW would hit 1.6 million of the lowest paid workers in the UK - and comes as the Labour government announced a hike for lowest earners this week in the Budget.

Before entering Parliament, Griffith was Sky's Chief Financial Officer, and it's been reported he made around £17m from the sale of his shares when Sky was sold to US giant Comcast.

Multi-Millionaire Mr Griffith also loaned his £9.5m London townhouse to Boris Johnson for use as a HQ for his Tory leadership campaign in 2019.

Yet he told the fringe event the introduction of the NMW had coincided with a "worklessness crisis".

Workers in the North East would be hardest hit by scrapping the minimum wage.

7.4 per cent of workers across the region are paid the minimum level. And in Griffith's own seat of Arundel and South Downs, there an estimated 2,200 minimum wage workers.

This is not the first time a top Tory has used a Taxpayers'Alliance event to attack the minimum wage. Speaking at the 2013 Conservative conference, James Cleverly, the former Tory leadership contender, said he wanted to see the minimum wage scrapped.