Michael Gove has blamed Liz Truss for the Conservative Party’s collapse in the so-called blue wall of safe Tory seats.
The party is facing a wipeout in its traditional southern English heartlands at the general election, with the Liberal Democrats and Labour eyeing a series of high-profile scalps, including Mr Gove’s former Surrey Heath seat.
And Mr Gove, who represented the area for two decades, blamed the Tories’ struggles on Ms Truss and her September 2022 mini-budget.
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Speaking to The Independent on the Tory party’s battle bus on Thursday, the housing secretary said: “One of the challenges in particular that we face, and it applies in seats like the one I have represented but also more broadly, is the reputation for sound economic management, which is essential for Conservative success, took a bit of a knock in the period between Boris and Rishi.”
The veteran minister, who has been around the cabinet table almost constantly since 2010, refused to name Ms Truss directly, but said her premiership was “undoubtedly a challenge” for the Conservatives.
His scathing intervention came after Britain’s top polling guru Professor Sir John Curtice warned the Tories are heading for the worst performance since the First World War “by a country mile”.
A damning seat-level poll on Wednesday night put Mr Gove’s Surrey Heath seat as “too close to call”, with his successor Ed McGuinness expected to narrowly hold on.
And the Savanta survey put chancellor Jeremy Hunt on course to lose his Surrey seat, Godalming and Ash, to the Liberal Democrats.
Sir Ed Davey’s party is also targeting former chancellor Nadhim Zahawi’s ex-seat of Stratford-upon-Avon and Wokingham where Brexiteer Sir John Redwood has just retired.
Other seats beyond a 15 per cent swing could also be targeted, including Chesham and Amersham which the Lib Dems won in a by-election in 2021.
Savanta’s bombshell survey even suggested Rishi Sunak is on course to become the first prime minister in history to lose his seat, with the Tories left with just 53 MPs.
The Savanta and Electoral Calculus polling analysis puts Labour on track to take 516 seats, with an estimated majority of 382 – twice the size of Tony Blair’s 1997 landslide – suggesting that recent Tory warnings of a Labour “supermajority” are correct.
Ms Truss declined to comment on Mr Gove’s accusation. But the Liberal Democrats said Mr Gove is “absolutely correct that voters across the blue wall are sick to the back teeth of this Conservative government”.
Deputy leader Daisy Cooper said: “The Conservative party trashed the economy, allowed filthy sewage to be pumped into our rivers, and brought local health services to their knees.”
Ms Truss was forced from office after just 49 days as PM after her disastrous so-called mini budget crashed the pound and sent mortgage rates soaring.
She became Britain’s shortest-serving prime minister and led to a collapse in Tory support.
Mr Gove said polls suggesting a blue wall wipeout were “snapshots and not projections”, suggesting the Conservatives could recover lost support.
But he said “I won’t deny there is a challenge, and if you ask what makes the election slightly more difficult than it might otherwise have been, it is that period [when Liz Truss was in charge]”.
Mr Gove declined to comment on Partygate and whether Covid rule-breaking gatherings in Downing Street under Boris Johnson contributed to the decline in Tory support, saying “that is a more complex issue”.
Asked about the future of the party after what is expected to be a devastating election loss, Mr Gove warned the Conservatives against a lurch to the right. “The Conservative Party is at its best when it embraces the spirit we had in 2010 and 2019 recognising you need to appeal to every part of the country,” he said.
