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Senior Conservatives have begun to hurl bitter recriminations as the party appeared on track for its worst election defeat in history — with Rishi Sunak the target of his colleagues’ deepening wrath.
Tory grandees and candidates were lining up to apportion blame within minutes of an exit poll, published at 10pm on Thursday showing the party was heading for a crushing defeat, returning fewer than one MP for every three of Labour’s.
By the early hours of Friday morning, the battle to shape the narrative of what had gone wrong — and where the party should go next — had already commenced.
Former party chair Sir Brandon Lewis highlighted the prime minister’s role in calling an early snap election. “I suspect right now that’s weighing on him very, very strongly . . . He will go down as the Conservative prime minister and leader who had the worst election result in over a century,” Lewis told GB News.
Lord Jo Johnson, a former Tory universities minister and the brother of former prime minister Boris Johnson, said it had been a “big mistake” for the Conservatives to become “a Reform-lite kind of party”, as he declared it was “hard to imagine a worse outcome than the one delivered by this campaign”.
Looking ahead, he urged the party to cleave to the “centre ground of British politics” rather than veer to the right, warning that the Tories’ predicted collapse in London was a “terrible indictment of their appeal to metropolitan, open-minded, liberal voters”.
However, some leading figures on the Conservatives’ right wing took a different view. Sir Jacob Rees-Mogg said his party had taken its supporters “for granted” by “failing to deliver on Conservative core principles” such as stopping boats bringing migrants to the UK. This had led to Tory voters “peeling off to Reform”.
The former business secretary also argued that the Tories’ woes had begun when a “small cabal” removed Johnson from power.
In an oblique swipe at Sunak, who has sometimes been criticised as a bland technocrat, Rees-Mogg said: “We are increasingly a presidential system and the charismatic individual leader is very important . . . Nigel [Farage] seems to have shown that in this election.”
Reform soared into second place in seven of the first eight constituency results announced, pushing the Conservatives into third place, which Tory officials parsed as an ominous harbinger for their party’s future in the north of England and Midlands in coming years.
As the results rolled in, some Conservative figures sought to deflect responsibility by highlighting external shocks the party had been forced to handle while in government.
Steve Baker, Northern Ireland Office minister, told the BBC that “the country has been through a number of big stresses”, including the coronavirus pandemic.
He conceded that the results forecast by the exit poll were “devastating” and admitted it would be “an extremely painful” night for the many Tory politicians poised to lose their seats — along with their families, their staff and the central party.
Baker, who is predicted to lose his Wycombe seat, added: “All of us are very worried about the future of the country under a Labour government.”
The Conservative party issued a peevish statement after the polls closed, warning that “taxes will rise and our country will be less secure” if Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer and his deputy Angela Rayner enters Downing Street on Friday.
A Tory spokesperson cautioned that the exit poll was only a “projection”, but admitted: “It’s clear that based on this result we will have lost some very good and hardworking candidates.”
Those working on the campaign defended their efforts. One official said that Isaac Levido, Sunak’s election strategist, held an all-staff meeting on Thursday and told activists: “You can all be proud that you’ve put Labour under a level of scrutiny that they haven’t been under for the past four and a half years. We’ll be proved right.”
Some Tories tried to put a brave face on the projected result, which, while dismal for the party, was less catastrophic than some polls had predicted in the days leading up to the election.
One former minister told the Financial Times that it “could have been worse”, while another senior party official said the forecast of just 131 seats was “fine”, adding: “Most people would have taken this at the beginning of the week.”
Some polls before the election had suggested the Tories would win as few as 53 seats.
Even before voters started heading to the polls on Thursday, however, attention in the party had already turned to the inevitable leadership contest set to ensue.
Former lord chancellor Robert Buckland, who lost his seat of Swindon South, predicted it would be a tumultuous contest. “The Conservatives are facing Armageddon,” he told the BBC. “It’s going to be like a group of bald men fighting over a comb.”
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