Suella Braverman has announced that she will withdraw from the Conservative Party leadership race because she does not want to hear the truth about why she lost the election.
The former interior minister said he had 10 MPs supporting his candidacy to pass the necessary threshold to enter the race.
But in an exclusive article for The Telegraph, he says there is no point, for better or worse, in someone like him becoming head of the Conservative Party “when most MPs disagree with my diagnosis and prescription”.
“The traumatized party does not want these things said out loud,” she writes.
The move could strengthen former Immigration Secretary Robert Jenrick’s leadership bid as his right-wing vote is likely to be split.
It is understood that one of the MPs who nominated him was Sir John Hayes, the influential chairman of the Common Sense Group of MPs, and he is now expected to switch to Jenrick.
Centrist MPs Tom Tugendhat, James Cleverly and Mel Stride have also thrown themselves into the ring, as has former home secretary Dame Priti Patel on the right. Shadow housing secretary Kemi Badenoch, a potential frontrunner, has also announced her candidacy.
In her article, Ms Braverman says the “disastrous” election result was not “a bizarre, ‘loveless landslide’ for Labour” but was because the Conservatives were “doing things all wrong”.
That’s why he apologized on election night, and why he did it “in all seriousness,” he says, both then and now.
Ms Braverman won her seat in Fareham and Waterloo by more than 6,000 votes and told voters “we are sorry my party did not listen to you”.
The party’s overall loss, he wrote, was “foreseeable, avoidable, deserved and has yet to be addressed.”
He said the “disaster” was caused by the Conservatives’ failure to deliver on promises to cut immigration to a record level, cut taxes and instead hit a 70-year peak, overreact to Covid, overpowering public services and reversing the Blairite legacy of international and domestic human rights laws.
He says: “It is not comfortable to accept these facts. I tried to put them forward and was denigrated by some of my colleagues. But that is the case.
“Whoever comes to power in our party, we must either accept these or be prepared to live in the desert for ten years.
“I can only apologise to the people who supported me. I apologise to the thousands of party members who wrote to me and to the disappointed former Conservative voters.
“I can’t stand because I can’t say what people want to hear. I’m not complaining about that – this is democracy in action and I worked for Keir Starmer. I’ve been branded as mad, evil and dangerous enough to see that the Conservative Party doesn’t want to hear the truth I’m putting forward. And that’s why I’m going to stand down here.”
Ms Braverman warned that Nigel Farage’s Reform UK party posed an “existential threat” to the Conservatives and could not be neutralised by comparing them to Nazis, referencing a taunt made by Mr Farage’s unsuccessful Tory rival in Clacton who had previously said the Conservative Party should embrace Reform and its four million voters.
Ms 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 it to resolve the small boat crisis, a key plank of Reform’s immigration policy.
“Nigel Farage has ruined us. We have no hope of recovery until we regain the trust of four million people. Branding them as racists and comparing their events to the Nuremberg Rallies didn’t work during the campaign and it won’t work now,” he said.
Ms. Braverman also criticizes leadership candidates who promote “fashionable clichés” about the need for unity. Mr. Cleverly and Mr. Stride have both presented themselves as unity candidates.
“This is all well and good, but it’s not honesty,” he says.
He cites his own rebellion in the cabinet, when he pushed Rishi Sunak to leave the ECHR and take a tougher stance on human rights laws. “When I argued two years ago that we should leave the ECHR to stop the boats, it was because it was right,” he says.
Ms Braverman suggested one of the reasons the Conservatives lost the election was because they were too united, approving policies such as the smoking ban, pedicabs, tax increases, the Windsor framework and even a “misguided” snap election.
“Not enough of our colleagues joined us, instead they piled the concept of ‘unity’ on a fatally flawed law that, as we predicted, failed to stop the boats. Compare that to the paralysis that paralysed Theresa May’s government. That was division,” he said.
“One moral of this story is that many colleagues have been lost at the altar of unity. Not because of the occasional comment from the next MP.”
Nominations close on Monday evening and MPs will vote to narrow the list to four candidates who will present at a conference in October, with the winners to be announced on November 2.