The former editor of Daily Telegraph Max Hastings has said he will be voting for Labour as he attacked the “dreadful” Rishi Sunak government and described the prime minister as a “loser”.
In the latest sign senior Conservative backers are giving up on Mr Sunak’s party and switching focus to a likely Labour government, Mr Hastings said he would back Sir Keir’s Starmer’s party.
The influential Mail columnist revealed his utter dismay with the Tory push to the right – calling the Tory membership a bunch of “Flat Earthers” who are “almost without exception fantasists”.
Mr Hastings described home secretary Suella Braverman’s policies are “grotesque”, attacked the “malign” influence of both Boris Johnson and Nigel Farage on the party and called Brexit a “disaster”.
“I think Sunak’s fate at the back end of this dreadful government is deeply unenviable, but there he is. And, of course, he’s always going to be remembered as the tail ender – the loser,” he said in an interview with the New European.
Mr Hastings said Mr Sunak was a “decent person”, before adding: “But is he a leader? I’m afraid not. I’ve always been sceptical whether people who are school head boys are likely to be good leaders.”
Mr Johnson’s former boss at the Telegraph said the man kicked out by his party last year was responsible for dragging the country into a “madly reckless and irresponsible mood” over Brexit.
The former editor said Mr Johnson was “the most selfish and irresponsible human being I think I’ve ever met” who had helped leave the Tory party as a group of “factions of the right”.
Attacking the membership, he said: “These people thought Liz Truss was the answer to the nation’s problems. As long as these 200,000 Flat Earthers around the country have a decisive voice, then I’m very gloomy about the Conservative Party’s prospects.”
Hastings ‘gloomy’ about Tories after push to right under recent PMs
Mr Hastings went on to say that “fear of Farage, who now threatens to rejoin the Tories, has made cowards of much of the party’s leadership”.
It comes as former Tory business minister Anna Soubry, who left the party to help form the anti-Brexit centrists in Change UK, announced she would be voting Labour at the next election.
“With Keir Starmer as leader they have the values and competence to deliver the change our country desperately needs,” she tweeted.
A major coup at this week’s Labour conference in Liverpool saw former Bank of England governor Mark Carney endorse the party in a video played for shadow chancellor Rachel Reeves speech.
The respected Canadian economist, in charge at the Bank from 2013 to 2020, said it was “beyond time we put her energy and ideas into action”.
A series of top Tory donors have denounced the party and pulled financial support, with some major backers even defecting to Labour as Sir Keir and Ms Reeves continue to “woo” big business.
Gareth Quarry, a former Conservative donor who defected to Labour, previously told The Independent that “dozens” of leading business figures – including Tory backers – had approached him asking how they could help to put Sir Keir Starmer in No 10.
John Caudwell, the Phones4U founder, told The Independent that he will not back Mr Sunak after his U-turn on net zero pledges – and revealed he was thinking of giving to Labour instead.
Iceland boss Richard Walker quit the Conservative party over Mr Sunak’s “flip-flopping” on net zero and HS2, and said he was “open to persuasion” on who to back at the next election.
Sir Rocco Forte – who gave £100,000 to the party to help fund the last general election – accused the party of reaping what it had sowed, claiming that “incompetence” had driven donors away.
