Suella Braverman will not run to be the next leader of the Conservative Party – saying she’s been branded “mad, bad and dangerous”.
The former home secretary had been expected to throw her hat in the ring but said she had chosen not to despite having the backing she needed before the 2.30pm deadline on Monday.
“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 wrote in an article for The Telegraph.
“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.
Ms Braverman said the party’s disastrous election result was down to failures on migration, taxes and “transgender ideology”.
“I’ve been branded mad, bad and dangerous enough to see that the Tory Party does not want to hear this. And so I will bow out here,” she added.
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Earlier this month, Ms Braverman spoke at the National Conservatism Conference in Washington DC where she blamed “liberal Conservatives” for the party’s general election defeat.
She has also warned that the Tories must not become “a collection of fanatical, irrelevant, centrist cranks”.
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While hosting an LBC Radio phone-in programme last week, Ms Braverman said she would vote for Donald Trump if she was a US citizen because “the world will be safer” with him as president.
Her announcement came as shadow housing secretary Kemi Badenoch became the sixth person to enter the leadership race with a pledge to tell voters the truth.
Writing in The Times, Ms Badenoch said the party deserved to lose in the election because it was “unsure of who we were, what we were for and how we could build a new country”.
She wrote: “The country will not vote for us if we don’t know who we are or what we want to be. That is why I am seeking the leadership of the Conservative Party to renew our movement and, with the support of the British people, to get it to work for our country again.”
Ms Badenoch joins James Cleverly, Tom Tugendhat, Robert Jenrick and Mel Stride, who declared last week, and Priti Patel, who launched her bid at the weekend, in the race.
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