The Conservative party needs to “get moving” with new policies or risk being cut adrift in a social media-informed world where people make up their minds quickly, Robert Jenrick has warned.

While the shadow justice secretary did not directly criticise Kemi Badenoch for the time she is taking to formulate policies, and said he accepted there was a need for reflection after a bad election defeat, he warned that without rapid action the Tories faced an “existential crisis”.

Badenoch, who defeated Jenrick in the party leadership race last year, has attracted some criticism within the party for her insistence that the Conservatives should not rush into policies but instead spend the next couple of years working to rebuild voters’ trust.

Asked about generating new polices at an event in London on Wednesday evening, Jenrick said: “I do think you’ve got to get moving. That’s not a criticism. I mean, that’s just self-evident, that we live in a highly competitive political landscape right now, and you’ve got to move fast, or else you’ll create vacuums others will step into.”

Jenrick, who regularly strays beyond his brief to offer suggestions on other areas, told the event at the Institute for Economic Affairs thinktank that his own aim within justice policy was to “be as proactive as possible and highlight what’s gone wrong, bring forward solutions”.

He went on: “I think we should be doing that because the public don’t just want to hear you criticising. They also want to hear that you’ve got some answers to those challenges.”

Responding to such a catastrophic electoral defeat “was always going to be very challenging and slow”, Jenrick said, but he warned that the party was at risk if it waited too long, particularly now it faced the challenge from Reform UK.

“The task of regaining trust is not easy,” he said. “I do think, though, that the modern age is one where the pace at which politics moves, the pace at which people form opinions about businesses, organisations, individuals, is fast.

“That’s fuelled in part by social media so that you can’t draw direct parallels with the ways in which oppositions have recovered in the past, even within our recent memory.

“In no prior instance have we, the Conservative party, had serious competition on the right, and so that does mean that there is a real sense of urgency, or should be, behind our efforts.”

The most direct parallel, he argued, was possibly with Labour in the 1980s when it was struggling against Margaret Thatcher’s Conservatives but also faced the rise of the centrist Social Democrat party.

“That was an existential crisis for the Labour party,” he said. “And so I think we have to adopt the same approach now, which is to view this for what it is, and go out there each and every day fighting to save the Conservative party.”