Tories ‘risk voter desertion’ if Liz Truss drops post-Brexit pledges | Senior Conservatives fear rise of a new Right-wing party could hurt them at next election if free-trade agenda is watered down

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  1. Senior Conservative MPs have warned that voters could desert the party “in droves” if Liz Truss drops her plans for post-Brexit reforms.

    Eurosceptic backbenchers rallied behind Ms Truss in the leadership election after she promised to pursue wider deregulation and turbocharge trade with Commonwealth countries.

    But figures on the Tory Right have insisted the Prime Minister must not be forced into any further U-turns as she seeks to break further from Brussels and pursue a free-trading agenda.

    Nigel Farage, former Ukip and Brexit Party leader, this week railed against Ms Truss’s decision to break a leadership election promise by raising corporation tax.

    “[This] will make us completely uncompetitive and completely unconservative,” he said. “Twelve years of Tory misrule. We need a realignment of British politics under a new electoral system – this lot have betrayed us, let us down completely and utterly.”

    In a further hint he is planning to return to frontline politics, Mr Farage told the Telegraph: “The Conservative Party as we know it is dead and needs to be replaced.”

    As she toured the country during the summer, Ms Truss said she would use Britain’s newfound freedoms to speed up transport projects – suggesting Brussels red tape had delayed these – and unleash more investment to grow the economy faster.

    Ms Truss also announced that around 2,400 EU laws on the UK statute books would be given a “sunset” clause by the end of next year, meaning decisions would be taken on whether to amend, scrap or keep these pieces of legislation.

    Senior Tories warned on Saturday that disillusioned voters could flock to a new Farage vehicle if Ms Truss were to back down on any more of her pledges.

    “The polling suggests that, at least temporarily, we’ve lost a lot of people already,” one MP told The Telegraph.

    “Liz will lose a lot of the others if she doesn’t deliver a lot of these things we’ve been talking about [during the leadership contest].

    “Obviously if they succeeded in getting a more Remain leader, people would leave in droves.”

    A second MP who backed Ms Truss’s campaign said: “Let’s be honest, the input of the Brexit Party to solve the impasse of the Brexit wars was very helpful. At times, pressure groups and protest parties can move the dial.

    “Perhaps a bit of pressure and push from somewhere wouldn’t be unhelpful, but politically, a new Right-wing party wouldn’t do us any good at all.

    “The thought [of a new Farage party] is almost too dangerous. We need to pull ourselves together, not rely on someone else to push us into it.”

    **‘Splinter party would let Labour win’**

    Another pro-Brexit backbencher dismissed the idea of an exodus of MPs to a new party as “utterly ridiculous”.

    “None of us joined Ukip and the Conservative Party is the only party which can build an alliance across the centre-Right,” they said. “A successful splinter party would simply let the Labour Party win.”

    Mr Farage stood down more than 300 Brexit Party candidates at the 2019 general election, a move that was partially credited with helping Boris Johnson win his 80-seat majority.

    Reform UK, the rebranded Brexit Party led by Mr Farage’s ally Richard Tice, currently polls at around five per cent.

    However, this is still enough to worry some backbenchers who fear such a margin would cost the Tories dozens of seats if they were within a few percentage points of Labour or neck-and-neck.

    Last month, More in Common, the think tank set up to combat polarisation in politics, identified a new group in Red Wall constituencies dubbed “disillusioned defectors”, who could power a surge in support for populists similar to that seen in Italy, Sweden and France.

    These voters suggested they would desert Ms Truss’s party for one that offered core “populist” policies, such as increasing criminal sentences and ending public funding for diversity and inclusion initiatives.

    The emergence of a populist Right-wing party would be among the biggest challenges the Prime Minister could face when seeking re-election, research by the Onward think tank showed earlier this year.

  4. So be it. You either want growth and prosperity or you want this populist right wing nonsense which is destroying the Conservatives anyway, let alone the country. Time to tell these right wing nutters that enough is enough, they’ve had their chance and look what they’ve done. I’m sick of it and them.

  5. The UKIP-ers within the Tory party are welcome to jump but under the current electoral system they have little chance in making any progress.

    Still I’m not going to stop them destroying the Tories on the way out

  6. The only time you need to be worried is when Farage is quiet. It means he’s got nothing to complain about.

  7. Last time around, with UKIP, the right wing Brexit section had a mission.

    What is their argument going to be now?

    See, isnt Brexit lovely? Look how much better off we are now that 1milluon foreigners have sodded off back where they came from?

    They can only campaign on hate – not sure the public will warm to that.

  8. It will be interesting to see what arguments Farage uses to persuade his base that decreasing corporation tax is a good thing, especially since many of his voters will be disillusioned middle-class types who will be asking them selves why corporations should pay less than they do in tax.

  12. You mean a new party with conservative values that would appeal to the conservative voters that the conservative party abandoned when they turned into the socialist/green party. Fuck you tories.

  13. Good?

    The Tories have been in power 4 over a decade now and the harsh truth is that be in power saps energy out of political parties.

    A good election blow out would allow them to clear out a lot of the senior members and allow newer people to come through and actually get some sort of ideological planning in place without the additional pressures of having to to immediately deliver them as the party of government.

  14. It’s the tories that being scared of right wing breakaway parties has got us into this mess in the first place. Now their membership is full of the former ukip types that has thrusted Truss onto us. Since the MP’s are scared then they want to screw everything up even more by kicking her out instead of doing the decent thing of calling a general election. Like it’s what Jabob Reece smog said should happen earlier in the year when he said there should be one if the tories removed Boris Johnson as Prime minister

  16. Maybe the fake Conservative Party could try conservatism for a change if they’re worried about someone else coming in on their patch? But they seem to be in love with social liberalism so I doubt it.

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