by Suella Braverman has announced she will withdraw from the Conservative leadership contest because the party does not want to hear the truth about why it lost the election.
The former home secretary said she had the necessary 10 MPs backing her candidacy to get her over the threshold to enter the race.
But in an exclusive article for The Telegraph, she says there was no point “for better or for worse” for someone like her “to lead a Tory Party when the majority of MPs do not agree with my diagnosis and prescription”.
“The trauma party doesn’t want to hear these things being said out loud,” she writes.
The move is likely to boost former immigration minister Robert Jenrick’s leadership run as her position is likely to split the right-wing vote.
It is understood that one of the MPs who nominated her was Sir John Hayes, an influential chairman of the Common Sense MPs group, who is now expected to move to Mr Jenrick.
Central MPs Tom Tugendhat, James Cleverly and Mel Stride as well as former home secretary Dame Priti Patel also threw their hats into the ring. Kemi Badenoch, the shadow housing secretary, and potential frontrunner has also confirmed her candidacy.
In her article, Mrs Braverman says the election result was not “catastrophic” or “some freak, ‘loveless landslide’ for Labor but because the Tories got “things terribly wrong”.
She says that was why she apologized on election night and “she meant it”, now and then.
Mrs Braverman won her seat of Fareham and Waterloo with a majority of more than 6,000, telling voters she was “sorry my party didn’t listen to you”.
She wrote that the party’s overall loss was “predictable, preventable, deserved and, as yet, not addressed”.
The “disaster”, she said, was due to the Tories’ failure to keep their promises to reduce record levels of immigration, cut taxes, which instead hit a 70-year high, public services be disabled by overreacting to Covid and reversing the Blairites. the legacy of international and domestic human rights laws.
She says: “It is not comfortable to accept these truths. I have tried to lay them out and have been vilified by some colleagues. But it is what it is.
“Whoever leads our party must accept them or prepare for ten years in the wilderness.
“I can only apologize to the people who supported me to stand. To the thousands of party members and the many disaffected former voters who wrote to me, I am sorry.
“I can’t run because I can’t say what people want to hear. I can’t complain about this – it’s democracy in action and it worked for Keir Starmer. I have been branded mad, evil and dangerous enough to see that the Tory Party does not want to hear the truths I have laid out. And so I will move out here.”
Mrs Braverman warned that Nigel Farage’s Reform UK party was a “huge threat” to the Tories that would not be neutralized by comparing them to the Nazis, referring to a jibe made by Mr Farage’s Tory rival in Clacton. She has previously said that the Conservative Party should embrace Reform and its four million voters.
Both Mrs Braverman and Mr Jenrick called for the UK to withdraw from the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) as one of the key measures to enable the UK to resolve the small boat crisis – a central plan of Reform policy on immigration.
“Nigel Farage destroyed us. We have no hope of recovery until we regain the confidence of the four million. Branding them as racists and comparing their events to the Nuremberg Rallies didn’t work during the campaign and it won’t work now,” she said.
Mrs. Braverman also criticizes candidates for leadership that took a “fashionable yardstick” about the need for unity. Both Mr Cleverly and Mr Stride are standing as union candidates.
“That’s fine but it’s not honest,” she says.
She cites her own rebellion in the Cabinet when she pushed Rishi Sunak to resign from the ECHR and take a tougher stance on human rights laws. “When I argued, two years ago, that we had to leave the ECHR to stop the boats, it was because it was true,” she says.
Mrs Braverman suggested that one of the reasons the Conservatives lost the election was because they were too united, pushing through policies such as the smoking ban, pedicabs, tax increases and the Windsor framework and even the “misleading” election.
“Many colleagues did not join us, instead putting ‘unity’ over a fatally flawed law that failed to stop the boats – as we predicted. Compare that to the paralysis that has plagued Theresa May’s government. Now there was that separation,” she said.
“The moral of this story is that so many colleagues were lost at the altar of unity. Not because of the occasional commentary from the bench.”
Nominations will close on Monday evening, paving the way for a vote by MPs which will narrow the candidates down to four who will put their cases before the conference in October before the winner is announced on 2 November.
