Dear Prime Minister, we can no longer act as bystanders

WE voted for you as Leader and PM because we believed you were committed to a moderate, openhearted Conservative Party in the One Nation tradition. We had hoped you would also continue to modernise our party so it could reach out and broaden its appeal to younger voters and to embrace and reflect the diversity of the communities we seek to represent.

Sadly, the Conservative Party has increasingly abandoned these principles and values with a shift to the Right. We no longer feel we can remain in the Party of a Government whose policies and priorities are so firmly in the grip of the ERG and DUP.

Brexit has redefined the Conservative Party – undoing all the efforts to modernise it. There has been a dismal failure to stand up to the hardline ERG which operates openly as a party within a party, with its own leader, whip and policy.

This shift to the Right has been exacerbated by blatant entryism. Not only has this been tolerated, it has been actively welcomed in some quarters. A purple Momentum is subsuming the Conservative Party, much as the hardLeft has been allowed to consume and terminally undermine Labour.

The final straw for us has been this Government’s disastrous handling of Brexit. No genuine effort was made to build a cross-party, let alone a national consensus to deliver Brexit.

Instead of seeking to heal the divisions or to tackle the underlying causes of Brexit, the priority was to draw up ‘red lines’. The 48 per cent were not only sidelined, they were alienated.

We find it unconscionable that a Party once trusted on the economy, more than any other, is now recklessly marching the country to the cliff edge of No Deal.

Running down the clock to March 9 amounts to a policy of No Deal and we are not prepared to wait until our toes are at the edge of the cliff. We can no longer act as bystanders.