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Louise Thomas
Editor
Boris Johnson has branded Rishi Sunak ideas in government as “zany” and laid the blame for the drubbing suffered by the Tories at this year’s general election at his feet.
In his new autobiography Unleashed Mr Johnson claimed that the defeat, which left the Tories with a mere 121 seats, had nothing to do with the scandals and his lies about Partygate and lockdown breaking.
He also did not attack his immediate successor Liz Truss for her mini Budget – she only merits three brief mentions in 738 pages in the book.
Instead, Mr Johnson hits out at Mr Sunak for a perceived betrayal which eventually saw him ejected from Downing Street after Partygate and the Chris Pincher scandal.
“Why did we do so badly in 2024?” he asked before answering himself: “It was pretty obvious. We junked the agenda on which we were elected, and turned our back on many of the people who put us in power.”
He went on to complain about how Mr Sunak’s government “alienated” parts of the coalition of support which gave the Tories 14 million votes in 2019 – 4 million more than Sir Keir Starmer received to win this year.
Mr Johnson’s greatest frustration was at the way that Mr Sunak supposedly disowned and ignored his legacy.
“For whatever reasons, we never mentioned any of the goood things about the period 2019 to 2022,” he said listing “getting Brexit done”, the fastest vaccine delivery in Europe and leading the defence of Ukraine as his chief achievements.
“Brexit was a taboo!” Mr Johnson wrote.
And he blasted Mr Sunak for his own initiatives including “zany ideas like making maths compulsory for all 18-year-olds, when we should have been focusing on basic numeracy at 11”.
Mr Johnson makes it clear that he believed the Tories could have won the election because under his leadership the party would have been cutting taxes by the end of the parliament, he said.
Mr Johnson also had advice for the next Tory leader to focus on: fix housing, immigration, skills, the NHS, infrastructure, government, the tax system, climate change, capitalism, and “the national obsession with running ourselves down”.
Mr Johnson’s obsession with Mr Sunak does not stop at him losing the election.
He also appeared to suggest that Mr Sunak was sent to spy on him by Michael Gove in 2016, just before Mr Gove torpedoed his leadership pitch.
“It so happened that Michael had appointed a bright young Brexiteer MP to be my minder; to sit with me in parliament when I made my pitch to coleagues and to make a note of what I said. He was called Rishi Sunak. Much later Rishi told me ‘You were far to trusting of those people. A lot of them weren’t on your side.’ Six years later I was to remember that remark – and the historical irony it contains.”
Mr Sunak was the second cabinet minister to resign after the Pincher affair triggering the collapse of Johnson’s government.
But Mr Johnson suggested that Mr Sunak was planning the betrayal all along and holding back economic recovery policy after the Covid pandemic.
He noted that the Ready for Rishi leadership campaign website had been launched in January 2022 before he was forced out almost six months later.
“It now occurs to me that he was saving his growth strategy and his new fiscal approach for the moment he took over. Oh well!”
He also made it clear that he was angry that Mr Sunak as chancellor had told him he needed to raise National Insurance to pay for care for the elderly but then reversed the hike when he was prime minister.
