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 required 10 MPs backing her candidacy to get her above the threshold to enter the race.
But in an exclusive article for The Telegraph, she says there was no point âfor good or illâ in someone like her ârunning to lead the Tory Party when most of the MPs disagree with my diagnosis and prescriptionâ.
âThe traumatised party does not want to hear these things said out loud,â she writes.
The move is likely to bolster former immigration minister Robert Jenrickâs run for the leadership as her standing would likely have split the Right-wing vote.
It is understood that one of the MPs who nominated her was Sir John Hayes, the influential chairman of the Common Sense group of MPs, who is now expected to switch to Mr Jenrick.
The centrist MPs Tom Tugendhat, James Cleverly and Mel Stride as well as, on the Right, the former home secretary Dame Priti Patel, have also thrown their hats into the ring. Kemi Badenoch, the shadow housing secretary, and a potential frontrunner has also declared her candidacy.
In her article, Mrs Braverman says the âdisastrousâ election result was not âsome freak, âloveless landslideâ for Labour but because the Tories âgot things monumentally wrongâ.
She says that this was the reason she apologised on election night and âmeant itâ, both then and now.
Mrs Braverman won her Fareham and Waterloo seat with a majority of more than 6,000, telling voters that she was âsorry my party didnât listen to youâ.
She wrote that the partyâs overall loss âwas predicted, preventable, deserved and, as yet, unaddressedâ.
The âdisasterâ, she said, was down to the Toriesâ failure to keep its promises on cutting record levels of immigration, reducing taxes, which instead went to a 70-year high, disabling public services by overreacting to Covid and reversing the Blairite legacy of international and domestic human rights laws.
She says: âItâs not comfortable accepting these truths. Iâve tried to set them out and been vilified by some colleagues. But it is what it is.
âAnyone who leads our party needs to accept them or else prepare for a decade in the wilderness.
âI can only apologise to the people who backed me to stand. To the thousands of party members and the many disenchanted ex-Conservative voters who have written to me, Iâm sorry.
âI cannot run because I cannot say what people want to hear. I do not complain about this – itâs democracy in action and worked for Keir Starmer. Iâve been branded mad, bad and dangerous enough to see that the Tory Party does not want to hear the truths Iâve set out. And so I will bow out here.â
Mrs Braverman warned that Nigel Farageâs Reform UK party posed an âexistential threatâ to the Tories which would not be neutralised by comparing them to the Nazis, referring to a jibe made by Mr Farageâs unsuccessful Tory rival in Clacton. She has previously said the Conservative Party should embrace Reform and its four million voters.
Mrs Braverman and Mr Jenrick have both called for the UK to quit the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) as one of the key measures to enable the UK to solve the small boats crisis â a central plank of Reformâs policy on immigration.
âNigel Farage destroyed us. We have no hope of recovery until we win back the trust of the four million. Branding them as racists and comparing their events to Nuremberg Rallies did not work during the campaign and it wonât work now,â she said.
Mrs Braverman also criticises candidates for the leadership who had come out with âfashionable platitudesâ about the need for unity. Mr Cleverly and Mr Stride have both pitched themselves as unity candidates.
âThatâs all fine but itâs not honest,â she says.
She cites her own rebellions in Cabinet when she pushed Rishi Sunak to quit the ECHR and take a tougher stance on human rights laws. âWhen, two years ago, I argued that we needed to leave the ECHR to stop the boats, itâs because it was true,â she says.
Mrs Braverman suggested that one of the reasons the Conservatives lost the election was because they were too united, nodding through policies such as the smoking ban, pedicabs, tax rises and the Windsor framework and even the âmisguidedâ early election.
âNot enough colleagues joined us, instead putting âunityâ above a fatally flawed law that failed to stop the boats – as we predicted. Compare that to the paralysis that crippled Theresa Mayâs government. Now that was division,â she said.
âOne moral of this story is that so many colleagues were lost at the altar of unity. Not because of occasional comment from backbenchers.â
Nominations close on Monday evening, paving the way for voting by MPs which will whittle down the candidates to four who will present their cases to the conference in October before the winner is declared on Nov 2.
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