Rightwing Conservative MPs have accused Rishi Sunak of abandoning voters who brought the party to power in 2019 amid a backlash against his reshuffle and polling suggesting public opposition to David Cameron’s return.
Unhappiness with Sunak’s reshuffle, particularly the sacking of Suella Braverman as home secretary, prompted a group of predominantly “red wall” MPs to issue a scathing rebuke of the prime minister and the pro-European credentials of his new foreign secretary.
A statement issued by the MPs Miriam Cates and Danny Kruger, co-chairs of the New Conservatives group, reaffirmed support for Sunak himself but added: “We are concerned that [Monday’s] reshuffle indicates a major change in the policy direction of the government. The Conservative party now looks like it is deliberately walking away from the coalition of voters who brought us into power with a large majority in 2019.”
The New Conservatives – a group created in May that includes the party’s deputy chair, Lee Anderson – are understood to be taking a “drip by drip” approach to voicing their concerns to try to maximise pressure on Sunak as Cameron becomes a lightning rod for discontent.
In an interview with GB News, Kruger claimed: “I’m afraid we’re going back into the politics of decline. [Cameron] led the remain campaign and here he’s now in charge of our relations with Europe.”
An Ipsos UK poll found that a third of voters said appointing Cameron to the Foreign Office was the right decision, while 46% said it was wrong. It also found that the public has a mostly negative view of his time as prime minister.
More than half of people said he did a bad job of managing the UK’s relationship with the EU, managing immigration and improving public services.
Seven in 10 respondents said they thought Sunak had made the right decision in removing Braverman.
After the first gathering of the new cabinet on Tuesday, the New Conservatives described the 2019 election win under Boris Johnson as one built on the victory of the leave vote in the 2016 Brexit referendum.
The group said those voters had “rejected the declinist consensus” among the parties during the Cameron years, which they blamed for two decades of wage stagnation, a “failed foreign policy oriented towards China and the European Union and a cultural agenda which denigrated the history of Britain and even denied the reality of biological sex”.
It said: “Until yesterday, we held on to the hope that the government still believed in the realignment. In political terms, it appears the leadership has decided to abandon the voters who switched to us last time, sacrificing the seats we won from Labour in 2019 in the hope of shoring up support elsewhere.”
For now, the extent of support for Braverman remains unknown, although her backers claimed last Friday that there were up to 50 MPs ready to complain if she was sacked after controversies including her accusations that police showed favouritism to causes such as Black Lives Matter.
Discontent was expressed by MPs from beyond the New Conservatives, with those on the libertarian right also weighing in. Cameron symbolised “the politics of yesterday”, the former chancellor Kwasi Kwarteng said on Tuesday as he and a number of others said the new foreign secretary would have to spell out his commitment to what they regarded as the opportunities presented by Brexit.
The former business secretary Jacob Rees-Mogg claimed on Monday night that the Conservatives were in danger of losing votes to the Reform UK party, saying the champagne would be flowing at its headquarters.
Reform’s leader, Richard Tice, claimed on Tuesday that hundreds of new recruits had already come over to the party after a day of what he described as “Tory chaos”.
