Defeated Tory quits party saying it has ‘no chance of ever being electable again’

A former Tory MP who lost his seat at the general election has quit the party, saying it has “no chance of ever being electable again”.

Marcus Fysh had represented Yeovil since 2015 but lost to the Liberal Democrats on Thursday as they overturned a majority of more than 16,000.

A minister in Liz Truss’s government, he was a staunch Brexiteer and one of the 28 ‘Spartans’ who voted on three occasions in 2019 against Theresa May’s Brexit deal.

Responding to a user who asked whether he would join Reform UK, Mr Fysh wrote: “No.

“[We] need to be irreproachably centre and centre-Right, sensible, small-c conservative appealing to the whole country.”

In a separate post, Mr Fysh said the Conservative Party “was no longer a thing” in the wake of an electoral wipeout that left it with just 121 MPs.

A number of key figures on the Tory Right lost their seats on Thursday including Ms Truss, the former prime minister, and Sir Jacob Rees-Mogg, a former business secretary.

Former cabinet ministers Kwasi Kwarteng and Sir John Redwood, who was head of the No 10 policy unit under Margaret Thatcher, stood down in the run-up to the July 4 vote.

The scale of the Conservative defeat, which left the party in opposition for the first time in 14 years, has already prompted bitter recriminations across all wings of the party.

Lord Frost, Boris Johnson’s Brexit negotiator, said on Saturday he was glad that several high-profile centrist MPs, including Damian Green and Matt Warman, had lost their seats.

“One of the few bright points of this debacle is to see so many so-called ‘One Nation MPs becoming victims of the electoral strategy they advocated so vigorously,” he said.