Former home secretary Suella Braverman on Monday criticised her Conservative Party colleagues for branding her "mad, bad and dangerous." Braverman decided not to contest the Tory leadership race to succeed Rishi Sunak as opposition leader.
The 44-year-old member of parliament from Fareham and Waterlooville in south-east England was expected not to join the race by Monday's nomination deadline. She would have gone up against fellow former home secretary Priti Patel and other former ministers – Kemi Badenoch, James Cleverly, Tom Tugendhat, Robert Jenrick, and Mel Stride.
Contrary to some media reports that she had failed to find the required 10 MPs to propose her candidacy, Braverman said she chose to step aside because her party was unwilling to accept her analysis 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," Braverman wrote 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 wrote.
According to the former minister, who Sunak sacked as home secretary, the party's disastrous election result was due to failures on "migration, taxes and trans ideology." She also criticised the lack of a proper rebellion against Sunak's leadership over the party's controversial Rwanda scheme to deport illegal migrants to the African nation.
She wrote: "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 called for the UK to leave the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) to make the Rwanda scheme work, something the incoming Labour government has ruled out as it shelved the deportation programme.
While admitting that the Tories got things "monumentally wrong" and declaring 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 that, 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 process to narrow down to the final two candidates, the new leader will take their place as the UK's opposition leader on November 2.
(With inputs from PTI)
Bob Blackman MP speaks during the event