Nadine Dorries has revealed she is standing down at the next election, warning the Tory party’s dismal poll ratings are “terminal”.
The ardent Boris Johnson ally made the announcement just days after starting a new job hosting a show on TalkTV.
In a clip released ahead of Friday night’s programme, Ms Dorries hit out at Rishi Sunak supporters, claiming they were responsible for the Conservatives’ drop in popularity.
She also blasted the Tories for “infighting” and “stupidity”, and claimed Mr Johnson had begged her to stay.
“The elite, the faux political intellectuals, you know who I’m talking about – those who believe they know better than anyone else – bet everything on a Rishi bounce … but it never came and it was never going to,” she said.
“The party was five points behind on the day Boris was ousted … and that was a poll deficit that would have burnt away like a summer’s mist on a morning lawn in the heat of a general election campaign.
“Today it’s 24 points behind. And that, my friends, could be described as terminal. It leaves the party boxed into a corner with no exit route,” she went on.
“Those MPs who drank the Kool-Aid and got rid of Boris Johnson are already asking themselves the question … who next?
“And I’m afraid that the lack of cohesion, the infighting and occasionally the sheer stupidity from those who think we could remove a sitting prime minister, who secured a higher percentage of the vote share than Tony Blair did in 1997, just three short years ago – that they could do that and the public would let us get away with it. I’m afraid it’s this behaviour I now just have to remove myself from.”
The former culture and media secretary told her studio guests that “regicide is in our DNA” in the Conservative Party but added: “I think where we are now… how the party is behaving now, I don’t see any way.
“Fight for what? Fight with who? People are only fighting each other in my party.”
She also revealed Boris Johnson begged her to stay, saying, “He doesn’t want me to go … he said, ‘Nads – stay’.”
The decision had followed “much soul-searching”, and she wanted to distance herself from the infighting, she said.
“That’s the worst, weakest, and least attractive position for any government to find itself in. There is no way on God’s earth that those who plotted to depose Boris Johnson expected to be in the position we’re in today. The Conservatives are polling worse now than in 1997 when they were thrashed by Labour.”
Other Conservatives who have decided to quit at the next election include former health secretaries Sajid Javid and Matt Hancock, former environment secretary George Eustice and levelling up minister Dehenna Davison.
