The Tories must not descend into “bitter infighting and finger-pointing”, the shadow home secretary has said, as he warned that the Conservative Party must unite if it is to offer a credible opposition and win back trust.
James Cleverly, who is weighing up whether to stand for the Tory leadership, said in an article for The Times that the Tories had been punished by voters because they were “too often divided” and had lost their focus on delivery. “That cannot happen again,” he said. “The British people deserve better.”
He said that the Tories need a “sensible post mortem” but should move on to make a “broad” offer to the electorate. Cleverly, who is seen as a centrist, said that the Tories should not “delude ourselves” that there were simple answers to the challenges faced by the nation.
He argued that the Tories should not become “distracted by navel-gazing” but must instead hold Starmer and the Labour government to account. He said that as shadow home secretary he would “ensure their surrendering of our borders is not going unchallenged”.
He said: “We must get our act together. We need to unite in order to deliver. It will take humility and hard work, to recover our reputation for competence and integrity, to rebuild trust in our party, and unite behind a broad platform that will give people a reason to vote Conservative again.
Advertisement
“We must do this, for the sake of our party and country, so we can put ourselves in the best possible position to win the next general election and once again deliver for the British people.”
Cleverly wrote that in recent years, his party had “lost our well-deserved reputation for competence and good government.
“We were too often preoccupied with infighting. We were too often divided. Our standards slipped and with it went our focus on delivery. That cannot happen again. The British people deserve better.
“We must now rediscover that competence to become an effective opposition and give ourselves the best possible chance of returning to government at the next election.”
However, some of the putative Tory leadership contenders are already clashing publicly. Suella Braverman, the former home secretary, accused Robert Jenrick of being a “centrist Rishi supporter” who is “from the left of the party”.
Jenrick, the former immigration minister, and Braverman are both thought to be preparing leadership bids as they seek to appeal to MPs on the right of the party.
Advertisement
Danny Kruger, who was previously one of Braverman’s most high-profile supporters, has already switched his allegiance to Jenrick. One Tory source said that Braverman’s campaign is “dead before it has even started”.
Braverman declined to confirm she was running but told The Telegraph: “I remember talking to [Jenrick] about leaving the ECHR [European Convention on Human Rights] a year ago, and him looking horrified by that prospect. It’s really good that he’s moving in a different direction.”
Jenrick, who resigned from Sunak’s government after saying the plan to send migrants to Rwanda did not go far enough, said on Sunday that the party had lost the election “fundamentally because we failed to deliver on the promises we made to the British public”.
Braverman told the National Conservatism conference in Washington DC on Monday that she was “very pleased to have emerged from the battle royale of last week’s general election”, winning her Fareham & Waterlooville with a reduced majority of 6,000 votes.
She told the conference that the party had to advocate repealing the Human Rights Act and becoming the “party of family” and “traditional culture”.
Advertisement
Braverman said the “phenomenon” of Reform UK was an “existential threat” to the Conservative Party but added it was “entirely predictable … and could have been avoided”. She concluded her speech by saying “onward, comrades — we can win, we can overcome”.
She told the conference that the party’s problem was that the “liberal Conservatives who trashed the Tory party think it was everyone’s fault but their own”. Her pitch appeared to position her as one of the most right-wing leadership contenders. She told the conference: “My party governed as liberals and we were defeated as liberals. But seemingly, as ever, it is Conservatives who are to blame.”
