London, Britain’s former home secretary, Suella Braverman, on Monday lashed out at her Conservative Party colleagues for branding her “mad, bad and dangerous” as she decided not to contest the Tory leadership contest to succeed Rishi Sunak as Opposition Leader.
The 44-year-old Indian-origin member of Parliament from Fareham and Waterlooville in south-east England was widely expected to not join the race by Monday’s nomination deadline to go up against fellow Indian-origin former home secretary Priti Patel and other former ministers – Kemi Badenoch, James Cleverly, Tom Tugendhat, Robert Jenrick and Mel Stride.
However, contrary to some media reports that she had failed to find the requisite 10 MPs to propose her candidacy, Braverman said she had chosen to step aside because her party was unwilling to accept her diagnosis of what led to its worst electoral defeat in history earlier this month.
“I’ve been branded mad, bad and dangerous enough to see that the Tory Party does not want to hear the truths I’ve set out,” writes Braverman in ‘The Daily Telegraph’.
“Although I’m grateful to the 10 MPs who wanted to nominate me for the leadership, getting onto the ballot is not enough. There is, for good or for ill, no point in someone like me running to lead the Tory Party when most of the MPs disagree with my diagnosis and prescription. The traumatised party does not want to hear these things said out loud. Instead, platitudes about ‘unity’ are fashionable. That’s all fine but it’s not honest,” she writes.
According to the former minister who was sacked by Sunak as home secretary, the party’s disastrous election result was down to the party’s failures on “migration, taxes and trans ideology”. She also lamented the lack of a proper rebellion against the former British Indian leader as she criticised his leadership over the party’s controversial Rwanda scheme to deport illegal migrants to the African nation.
She writes: “The reality is that we were a united party under Rishi Sunak. We MPs united to install him as PM with a coronation…Precisely everything on Rishi’s agenda was nodded through: smoking bans, pedicabs, tax rises, Windsor framework and even the misguided early general election.
“In fact, if only our Rwanda rebellion had succeeded, we would have got flights off. But not enough colleagues joined us, instead putting ‘unity’ above a fatally flawed law that failed to stop the boats – as we predicted.”
A barrister by profession, the Goan heritage politician had led calls for the UK to leave the European Convention on Human Rights to make the Rwanda scheme work, something the incoming Labour government has categorically ruled out as it shelved the deportation programme.
However, while admitting that the Tories got things “monumentally wrong” and declared that the general election defeat was “predicted, preventable, deserved and, as yet, unaddressed”, she pledged to support whoever takes charge as a backbench MP.
“I wish all the candidates the best. The survival of our party depends on the outcome of this contest. And it is not just about unity. Pretending that we are united on the surface when we are unreconciled on policy won’t work,” she added.
The final list of candidates in the race to replace Sunak will be unveiled this week after which they will kick off their campaigns to sway enough MPs to vote for them in the first round of votes ahead of the Conservative Party conference at the end of September. After a whittling down process to the final two candidates who will fight it out for the wider Tory membership vote through October, the new leader will take their place as the UK’s Opposition Leader on November 2.
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