Tories 'deserve' landslide defeat because of Sunak's 'idiotic strategy' that 'took voters for mugs', Braverman says
7 July 2024, 07:10 | Updated: 7 July 2024, 13:46
The Tories deserved their historic General Election defeat because of their "idiotic" strategy, Suella Braverman has warned.
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The former Home Secretary said that her party was punished in the election - which saw the Conservatives lose 252 seats - for being "insincere".
Ms Braverman said that some of her Conservative colleagues treated voters like "mugs", claiming that her party "failed in office and deserved this result".
Ms Braverman, who is on the right of the party, is said to be considering a tilt at the Conservative leadership, although she has not confirmed this publicly.
She would likely face competition from former Business Secretary Kemi Badenoch, her fellow former Home Secretary Priti Patel and ex-security minister Tom Tugendhat.
Writing in the Telegraph, Ms Braverman launched a scathing attack on Mr Sunak, who fired her as Home Secretary.
She wrote: "Rishi might not have meant Rwanda and did not do it, but I meant it and wanted it done.
"The promise he’d do it is why I’m the guilty woman who helped make him PM."
After the huge election defeat, there is likely to be a debate in the party about the direction it takes in the future - whether to the right, with a leader like Ms Braverman, or towards the centre.
Ms Braverman addressed this, writing of the division still rife in her party,
"So many of the so few colleagues who survived letting Rishi be Rishi still don’t get it," she said.
"Many saw the result coming months ago and advised a way out. We were vilified as ‘divisive’ and ‘self-indulgent’. One colleague told me to ‘STFU’."
What will now become of the Tories?
Ms Braverman added: "I say again, whatever some of my colleagues think, the voters aren't mugs: they saw what we did in office and ignored what we insincerely said while campaigning".
She wrote: "High taxes, high immigration, and – and I can hardly bear to say this – children literally, physically, mutilated by insane political correctness on our watch.
"The problem wasn’t people like me and [Tory peer] David Frost warning about the mistakes being made, it was the mistakes!"
Ms Braverman also advocated for the UK to "leave the European Convention on Human Rights, scrap the Human Rights Act and fix Labour’s Equality Act".
“All the other things we ought to argue for – and which we failed to do in office for 14 years – require that legal bedrock.
Robert Jenrick, Ms Braverman's fellow hard-liner on immigration in the Tory party, called for his remaining colleagues to acknowledge why the election went so badly for them.
Writing in the Times, he said: "It could have been worse. We narrowly avoided being wiped out altogether.
"It seems we were granted a stay of execution by millions of conservatives deciding to hold their nose and vote Conservative in the final few days of the campaign."
Former immigration minister Mr Jenrick added that "the reason for this near-existential result was not that we were too left-wing or too right-wing. Nor because we had this slogan not that slogan.
"No, the fundamental reason we lost is because we failed to deliver what we promised for the British people.We got Brexit done. But we must collectively confront a hard truth: we then failed to deliver the strong economy, NHS, and secure border we promised."
