The Tory leadership race is hotting up and there’s lots of familiar faces featuring this time around. Kemi Badenoch, Priti Patel, Tom Tugendhat – it’s like the 2022 contest never ended! But one candidate who sadly isn’t running is Suella Braverman, the onetime standard-bearer of the Brexiteer right. She has penned a piece for Monday’s Telegraph, declaring that she will not throw her hat in the ring – even though she claims to have had the backing to hit the necessary threshold before the 2.30 p.m deadline.
‘Although I’m grateful to the 10 MPs who wanted to nominate me for the leadership, getting on to the ballot is not enough,’ she writes. ‘There is, for good or for ill, no point in someone like me running to lead the Tory Party when most of the MPs disagree with my diagnosis and prescription of what went wrong and how to fix it.’ Braverman declares that: ‘I can only apologise to the people who backed me to stand. To the thousands of party members and the many disenchanted ex-Conservative voters who have written to me, I’m sorry. I cannot run because I cannot say what people want to hear.’ Truly, the Cassandra of the Commons, indeed. She concludes that:
I do not complain about this – it’s democracy in action and worked for Keir Starmer. I’ve been branded mad, bad and dangerous enough to see that the Tory Party does not want to hear the truths I’ve set out… Whoever takes charge will, I know, have the best intentions and I will support them from the backbenches for a Conservative revival, a privilege for which I am deeply grateful.
A revival about which Mr S suspects we will hear plenty from Braverman in her weekly Telegraph column…
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