Splinter group of Right-wing MPs pen their own manifesto
A POWERFUL group of Rightwing Tory MPs are preparing their own independent election manifesto as Rishi Sunak battles to keep his fractured party together.
The New Conservatives will publish a series of policy ideas on issues such as tax, immigration, education and online safety to ‘influence’ the main Tory election manifesto. Miriam Cates, the group’s co-chair, told The Mail on Sunday that the MPs would ‘produce a few manifesto ideas and then hand them to the party’, adding: ‘It is not about challenging current policy; it’s about feeding into new policy.’
The group, which also includes Devizes MP Danny Kruger, has led calls in the party for more true-blue policies to stem the increasing haemorrhage of support to Labour over recent months.
Ms Cates, who last week warned that the Government’s new definition of extremism could have a ‘chilling effect’ on free speech, hesitated when she was asked whether Mr Sunak was leading a genuinely Conservative Government. ‘Is the Conservative Party Conservative?
‘I think that is probably a bigger question,’ she said.
‘Rishi is probably the most socially conservative Prime Minister we’ve had since Margaret Thatcher. His personal convictions on a lot of the issues I care about, for example and family and kids, are spot-on.
‘The difficulties we have now are the cumulative effect of everything that’s happened since 2010, and particularly 2019, and sadly the fact that our party is so broad that it can’t agree on some of the most fundamental issues like immigration. Clearly we’re not doing well in the polls for a whole range of reasons .
‘But I think the biggest reason is that we haven’t managed yet to get back into that space in 2019 where we were offering some people something new, something Conservative, something that was a break from the past 30 years of political consensus and it doesn’t really feel like we have broken out of that.’ She added that ‘the only poll bounce we have had in the last two years’ was after Mr Sunak rolled back commitments to Net Zero environment policies last September.
Ms Cates, who was one of the last Tories to defend Boris Johnson as he was being forced out of Downing Street in 2022, also said that she would welcome the former prime minister on the campaign trail in her underthreat Penistone and Stocksbridge seat, which has a 7,200 majority. Mr Johnson has played down claims that he would play a prominent part in the Tories’ campaign.
‘The task in places like my constituency will be to really hammer home the message that a vote for Reform will let Labour in,’ she said.
She declined to comment on who should replace Mr Sunak if, as is increasingly speculated, he is forced out before the election. ‘I’m not going to be drawn on that because it is so hypothetical,’ she said.