Tory infighting erupts as Rishi Sunak says sorry for huge defeat

Rishi Sunak apologised to defeated Tory candidates as infighting broke out in the wake of the party’s worst general election result in modern history.

Speaking after winning his Richmond and Northallerton seat, he conceded defeat to Labour and said he had called Sir Keir Starmer to congratulate him on his victory.

He said: “The British people have delivered a sobering verdict tonight. There is much to learn and reflect on and I take responsibility for the loss.

“To the many good hard-working Conservative candidates who lost tonight, despite their tireless efforts, their local records of delivery, and their dedication to their communities, I am sorry.”

Grant Shapps, the Defence Secretary, Alex Chalk, the Justice Secretary, Lucy Frazer, the Culture Secretary, Gillian Keegan, the Education Secretary, and Sir Jacob Rees-Mogg, one of the architects of Brexit, all lost their seats.

Mr Shapps, who lost to Labour in Welwyn Hatfield, said it was “clear tonight that Britain will have a new government in the morning”.

Penny Mordaunt, tipped as a future Tory leader, lost her Portsmouth North seat to Labour. The Commons Leader, a centrist, represented the Conservatives in television debates during the campaign. She said her party had “taken a battering because it failed to honour the trust that people had placed in it”.

Rishi Sunak is expected to signal his intention to resign as Tory leader on Friday morning after leading his party to a historic defeat, sparking what could be a vicious battle to succeed him.

The arguments began on Thursday night, with the Right of the party accusing the Prime Minister of not having been Conservative enough, and the Left accusing the Right of putting off young, liberal voters.

Suella Braverman, a former home secretary who is seen as a likely Tory leadership contender, said the party “didn’t listen” to the British people and had “let you down” as she was re-elected in Fareham and Waterlooville.

Sir Jacob Rees-Mogg, a former Cabinet minister, echoed the sentiment, saying: “It is clearly a terrible night for the Conservatives. I’m afraid I think the Conservative Party took its core vote for granted.

“We have no divine right to votes. We need to win voters at every single election. And if you take your base for granted, if you don’t manage to stop the boats coming over, if you don’t manage to control migration when that’s what your voters are concerned about, your voters will look to other parties.

“So I think failing to deliver on Conservative core principles did us a lot of harm.”

Andrea Leadsom, another former Cabinet minister, said: “Perhaps the problem is the Conservatives have not been conservative enough.

“Maybe it was wrong not to go after Reform straight away but again, all of these are very carefully thought through as to what is the right approach and what we wanted to do was focus on what Labour would be doing with people’s taxes.”

But Sir Robert Buckland, a former Cabinet secretary on the other wing of the party, said a Tory lurch to the Right would only help Labour.

Speaking after becoming the first Conservative to lose his seat to Labour, in Swindon South, he said the coming leadership election would be a disaster, warning: “With the Conservatives facing electoral armageddon, It’s going to be like a group of bald men arguing over a comb.”

He hit out at Suella Braverman, the former home secretary, for writing an article in The Telegraph that called the result of the election before voters went to the polls. “We’ve seen, in this election, astonishing ill-discipline within the party,” he said. “It’s spectacularly unprofessional and ill-disciplined.”

One Tory peer on the Tory Left said the party was “in danger of being drummed out” of London. Lord Johnson, the brother of Boris Johnson, said: “That’s a terrible indictment of their appeal to metropolitan open-minded liberal voters. They have got to appeal to the people who live in our big cities.”

The Tories’ share of the vote was projected by Electoral Calculus to be just 25.8 per cent – worse than the previous lowest of 29.2 per cent recorded by the Duke of Wellington in 1832.

George Osborne, the former chancellor, said on Thursday night that Mr Sunak had led the Tory party to its “Waterloo”.

But he told ITV, the results were not quite as bad as some polls had been predicting, adding: “There’ll be a bit of a sign of relief, even though it’s the worst results since 1832, when the Duke of Wellington was running the Tory party. So this one feels more like the Tory party’s Waterloo, frankly.”

The Duke of Wellington’s forces beat those of Napoleon at Waterloo in 1815 before he took the party to a historic defeat.

Michael Fabricant, the former Tory vice chairman, tweeted: “Never in the history of general elections have so many been let down by so few.”

Baroness Davidson, a former leader of the Scottish Tories, said Rishi Sunak had run “one of the worst election campaigns in living memory”.

She told Sky News: “We upset pensioners by making the cut to National Insurance over income tax, we upset mortgage payers because of the Liz Truss year.

“We upset Remainers by being the party of Brexit in 2019. We upset Brexiteers this time around because we promised immigration would go down and it went up.”

“How do you cobble together a group of people who are going to vote for a party if you don’t have a coherent narrative of what the last 14 years is like if you’ve broken your promises, if you run probably one of the worst election campaigns in living memory, and if you have also lost your reputation for competency in government?”

Steve Baker, a former Brexit minister, said he believed the former prime minister “will do what he believes is in the national interest”, adding that Mr Sunak’s early exit from D-Day commemorations was “plainly a mistake”.

Discussing the Electoral Calculus prediction of a Tory vote share of only 25.8 per cent, Lord Hague, a former Tory leader, told Times Radio: “That would of course be a catastrophic result in historic terms for the Conservative Party.

“It’s also set against the expectations of all those predictions over the last few weeks, many of which have been that the Conservatives will get even fewer seats than that, even down to 64 seats in one prediction a couple of days ago.

“And one of the things on my mind has been… can they form a viable opposition? And if it is 131 seats, you can just about mount an effective opposition with 131 seats.”

He said the party would have to “build again for the future”, adding: “The Conservative Party at its greatest [has been the] governing party of the country because it could command the centre ground of politics, people of all walks of life, people of all age groups, and it will have to be able to do that,” he said.

“It will take a long time to be able to do that. But it will have to be able to do that.”

Sir Brandon Lewis, a former Tory chairman, told GB News: “He didn’t wait until the very last minute for an election and then call it when he had to call it. He chose when to call an election and he’ll know that he made that decision. That’s nobody else’s issue – the prime minister makes that decision.

“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.”

A Tory spokesman said: “If these results are correct it is clear that Keir Starmer and Angela Rayner will be in Downing Street.

“That means your taxes will rise and our country will be less secure. ⁠It’s clear that based on this result we will have lost some very good and hard-working candidates.”

Asked whether he was to blame for the Tory defeat because he had been chancellor during Ms Truss’s disastrous premiership, Kwasi Kwarteng said: “It’s on the whole party. It’s on 14 years.”