Former defence secretary says Tories should respond to Corbyn’s election as Labour leader by sticking to traditional policies and not veering left

The Conservative party must not move too far to the centre ground in response to Jeremy Corbyn’s victory in the Labour leadership election, a former Tory defence secretary has said.

Speaking at a fringe event at the Conservative party conference in Manchester on Monday, Liam Fox said: “Nature abhors a vacuum and it’s always rapidly filled.”

The MP for North Somerset said that unlike some of his Tory colleagues, he was not thrilled at the news of Corbyn’s landslide victory in the Labour leadership election. “I think it concentrates the mind of the parliamentary party well if they’re having to fend off an attack from outside,” he said.

“One of my worries about Corbyn is that it leads to a complacency in the [Tory] party that begins with them saying: ‘We don’t have to reduce the deficit so quickly, we don’t have to do all these things as quickly because they’re a bit unpopular and a bit painful.’

“The next stage of that is [to say]: ‘Well, we’ll vote against our own party if it looks like [a policy] might not be popular because there’s no real opposition out there.’

“That there’s no real opposition out there is not a good thing in parliamentary terms,” said Fox. “I’d much rather have a scary and credible leader of the opposition than Corbyn and that might sound perverse, but in the longer term it’s not healthy to have weak opposition.”

Fox said it was important that the party didn’t try to fill “anybody else’s space”. “We have own own space to fill, our own polices and our own values to propagate ... as Mrs Thatcher used to say, good leaders don’t move to the centre, good leaders move the centre to them.”

Fox’s comments echo those of Chris Grayling, leader of the Commons, who spoke at an event called Is the State Too Big, Too Bossy and Too Bureaucratic? on Sunday evening. Grayling warned his party against a shift leftwards in response to Corbyn’s win.

“When you’ve got the country’s principle opposition party arguing for nationalisation, arguing for an increase in the size of government, planning to print money for public works projects, you realise that we as Conservatives are going to have to win the old arguments all over again,” said Grayling.

“And that, to my mind, alongside the job of bringing down the size of the state during this parliament in government, is the other crucial part of what we’ve got to achieve.

“But our response to the crucial challenge that we face must not be to move to the left ... We must continue to embrace the free market. We need to look to shrink the size of the state ... but we must not seek to emulate our opponents by moving away from the common ground on which we win elections, which is what this country wants.”

• This article was corrected on 6 October 2015. It had previously referred to Liam Fox as a former MP.