Rishi Sunak will face pressure to adopt hard rightwing policies such as an immigration cap and scrapping European human rights law this week, with Suella Braverman saying he needs to “own and fix” a disastrous set of local election results.
Sunak’s allies were on Sunday insisting he wanted to stick to his current plan and that it was working, as plotters against his leadership accepted they did not have the support to challenge him.
But Braverman issued an extraordinary broadside against Sunak on a BBC news programme, saying she regretted voting for him to be leader but it was too late to get rid of him. She also said the party would be “lucky to have any MPs” if it continued on the same path.
Urging him to change course, she called for more conservative policies such as withdrawing from the European convention on human rights – a move that would be hugely unpopular with moderate Conservatives.
Braverman told the BBC’s Sunday with Laura Kuenssberg: “I love my country, I care about my party and I want us to win, and I am urging the prime minister to change course, to – with humility – reflect on what voters are telling us, and change the plan and the way that he is communicating and leading us.”
Asked about whether she wanted to see a change in leader, Braverman said: “I just don’t think that is a feasible prospect right now, we don’t have enough time and it is impossible for anyone new to come and change our fortunes to be honest. There is no superman or superwoman out there who can do it.”
Instead she called on Rishi Sunak to “own” the result, adding: “Therefore he needs to fix it.” One of her allies, John Hayes, called for a reshuffle to bring her back into the cabinet.
Robert Jenrick, the former immigration minister and communities secretary, along with ex-minister Neil O’Brien are to publish a pamphlet this week urging more action to bring down migration before the election.
However, Sunak is looking at a schism in the party, as other senior Conservatives dismissed Braverman’s diagnosis that a swing further to the right was needed. Some Tories believe the prime minister needs to tack to the centre to take votes from Labour and the Lib Dems in marginal seats, while others believe the best strategy is squeezing the Reform UK vote on the right.
Andy Street, the former West Midlands mayor who narrowly lost to Labour on Saturday, said: “The thing everyone should take from Birmingham and the West Midlands is this brand of moderative, inclusive, tolerant conservatism, that gets on and delivered, has come within an ace of beating the Labour party in what they considered to be their back yard – that’s the message from here tonight.”
Robert Buckland, a Tory MP and former justice secretary from the One Nation wing of the party, told GB News that the British public are “putting their fingers in their ears” about the Conservatives because they are engaged in too much infighting.
“The more that we talk about factions and ideology and the less we focus on business, on growth, on jobs, on housing, all those issues that actually people are talking about … then I think we’ve become an irrelevant rump,” he said.
“The Conservative party wins elections, not by being soft and mushy but by reflecting the views of the British public, by being in alliance with them. The coalition that we need is with the British people. We’ve been the party of the nation for generations. I believe we can get back to that, but we need to focus on what people are talking about.”
Sunak has been largely absent from the airwaves over the weekend, apart from appearing at Ben Houchen’s Tees Valley victory on Friday – a sole pocket of good news for the Conservatives.
However, Mark Harper, the transport secretary and a longtime supporter of Sunak, gave a round of broadcast interviews insisting the prime minister’s plan is working. He said the party still had “everything to fight for” and pointed to there being only nine points between the Tories and Labour in the vote share in England.
Another option being floated by some Conservative MPs is whether to give Boris Johnson a role in the election campaign, despite his difficult relationship with Sunak, his successor as prime minister after Liz Truss.
Andrea Jenkyns, a Conservative on the right of the party and a supporter of Johnson, told Sky News’s Sunday Morning with Trevor Phillips: “I would like to see real commonsense conservatism, honouring our manifesto commitments. I would like to see the return of Boris on the frontline of politics, whether that’s going for a seat in the next election and being front and centre of our election campaign.”
A report in the Sunday Times suggested this weekend that there had been contact between Johnson’s team and Nigel Farage’s camp about the possibility of reuniting the right of politics after the election although the two men are not understood to have spoken directly.
