As the Tory train clatters towards the election well behind in the polls, the leadership challengers are well and truly out of the traps. Guido has a round up of the latest bumps in the road to the next leadership race…
Penny Mordaunt: Penny’s clearly had an interest in this week’s totally coincidental Deltapoll survey finding that Tory voters think only she could defeat Starmer. Directing her guns on Labour (rather than highlighting her own policies) in an early attempt to appeal to Tory members…
Grant Shapps: The Defence Secretary is currently busy handling the nuclear fallout after an embarrassing fail let a Trident missile to misfire and crash into the ocean while he was on board HMS Vanguard. He will be relying on his usual media sang froid over the next few days as the details of this nuclear mess play out…
Kemi Badenoch: The culture warrior is consumed in a growing public bust up with former Post Office chair Henry Staunton. Staunton has been fighting back against Kemi’s accusation that his claim he was told to delay pay-outs to sub-postmasters ahead of the next general election was a “blatant attempt to seek revenge” against the government. The spat doesn’t look like it will ease up anytime soon. Tory chatter is talking this issue up the agenda – handling it well will be crucial for Kemi…
James Cleverly: The ConHome table topper is now having a difficult time in the Home Office. This week he sacked his border chief who spoke out on immigration ‘security failings’ – and who had several reports sat on by the Home Office. Remains to be seen whether Cleverly’s chances will be hamstrung by the policy crisis over illegal immigration…
Michael Gove: His latest legislative attack on landlords and second home owners will continue to upset many Tories. He continues to deny that Badenoch is his placeholder…
Jeremy Hunt: Will Hunt have another crack at it? He did say in 2022 that his ambition to be leader had not “vanished“. The budget will be a litmus test with a membership crying out for tax cuts…
Robert Jenrick: The former immigration minister has been the most vocal about a leadership bid, repeatedly refusing to rule it out. He’s gone quiet recently…
Suella Braverman: Many saw Suella’s resignation letter as Home Secretary to be the start of a leadership pitch. It suffered from a lack of follow up. Is she off the pitch..?
Do report any and all leadership maneuverings or evidence of plotting. It’s going to be a long year…
In her first interview since getting sacked by Sunak in November, Suella has come on GB News to talk to Chris Hope about Rwanda. She said the Sunak’s bill is “fundamentally, fatally flawed” as it fails to stop “pyjama injunctions” from the ECHR and allows claimants to delay their removals. 56 MPs have now signed onto to Bill Cash’s amendment, including Liz Truss, which is more than the government’s working majority. Whether they put up and vote against an unamended bill is another question…
Suella says the Jenrick and Cash amendments are needed to make the bill work – as it currently stands it “amounts to a betrayal of the British public” which she would vote against at third reading, along with a “significant number” of colleagues. Suella claims most ministers also know that the bill won’t work in its current state, though are keeping shtum…
Efforts to counter the orthodoxy of the OBR are growing. 46 Tory MPs and four peers, including Jacob Rees-Mogg, Priti Patel, and Suella Braverman, wrote to Jeremy Hunt on Sunday and have now published a report into the OBR’s wildly inaccurate forecasts. Their analysis has found:
The Conservative Way Forward group says that Hunt should end the Treasury’s “unhealthy dependence” on the OBR and “allow a diverse range of perspectives to provide scrutiny of the government’s budget and fiscal events”. The Tories will have to kill their own baby…
In the OBR’s first ever analysis of its long-term performance last summer the quango finally admitted it tends “to overestimate real GDP growth and underestimate government borrowing”. Meanwhile its continued failure to use dynamic modelling in its forecasts means it always concludes tax cuts are doomed to fail…
Read the group’s report and their letter to Hunt below:
Allies of Suella Braverman have claimed she “fought tooth and nail” to “block the woke” school guidance on social transitioning the government released today. Back in 2022 whilst she was still in post, she proposed her own trans guidance in a speech to Policy Exchange. It was – according to Badenochians- much more lenient…
Braverman’s suggestion was to treat each case that reinforces a child’s declared transgender status “individually” only after “all safeguarding processes have been followed”. Surely more ‘woke’ than the new guidance which states there is no general duty to allow a child to “social transition.”
On a separate note, a government source contacted Guido to remind his readers that Liz Truss, who also criticised the guidance, served as the Minister for Women and Equalities for more than two years. During her tenure, she not only refrained from issuing any guidance for schools on transgender issues, she also obstructed the Equality and Human Rights Commission from investigating the matter in August 2020. The internecine Tory culture war overlaps with future leadership jostling…
In a dramatic statement in the Commons, the ousted former Home Secretary Suella Braverman has laid out her Rwanda position. She said that we don’t actually have to leave the ECHR, even though she favours it – emergency legislation can be enacted, but has to meet the following five tests:
Braverman finished by saying “electoral oblivion” awaits the Tories if another failing bill is put forward. The gauntlet is thrown down…
