Suella Braverman has blamed “virtue signalling” “liberal Conservatives” for her party’s historic defeat at the general election.
The former home secretary, who is widely tipped to run to succeed Rishi Sunak as Tory leader, told the National Conservatism conference in Washington the party had taken a “good hiding”.
“We won a great majority in 2019 promising to do what the people wanted,” she said.
“We were going to use our Brexit freedoms and stop waves of illegal migrants. We were going to cut taxes. We were going to stop the lunatic woke virus. We did none of this.”
“Our problem is us. Our problem is that the liberal Conservatives who trashed the Tory party think it was everyone’s fault but their own.
“My party governed as liberals and we were defeated as liberals. But seemingly, as ever, it is Conservatives who are to blame.”
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Braverman is set to speak via a video link to a Popular Conservatism post-election event on Tuesday, alongside fellow former cabinet ministers Sir Jacob Rees-Mogg and Lord Frost.
Speaking to the National Conservatism conference in Washington on Monday evening, Braverman went on to criticise the flying of the Progress Pride flag over government buildings to “show how liberal and progressive we are”.
The former home secretary said: “We Tory ministers, nominally in charge of the system, completely failed.
“The progress flag flew over our buildings as if they were occupied territory. I actually asked, as a minister, ‘why is this happening, who says that it has to’, and could get no answer.”
“I couldn’t even get the flag of a horrible political campaign I disagreed with taken down from the roof of the government department I was supposed to be in charge of.
“The Progress flag says to me is one monstrous thing: That I was a member of a government that presided over the mutilation of children in our hospitals.”
“We Tories, right through our smoking ruin of a general election campaign, claimed that we were doing something about trans fanatics, when in fact what we did was let it happen.
“I am too physically repulsed to go into what ‘it’ is. But it is something that the true grown-ups in any civilised society should never have allowed to happen to their or anyone else’s children.”
Braverman was elected as MP in the redrawn constituency of Fareham and Waterlooville with a 6,000 majority.
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