Suella Braverman skewers Starmer as she highlights key fact about Labour's election win
Suella Braverman is a leading figure on the right of the Conservative Party and were she to defect to Reform it would represent a huge blow.
Suella Braverman admits Conservatives 'didn't fulfil promises'
Suella Braverman has mocked new Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer in the wake of the July 4 general election - pointing out that Labour actually got fewer votes than it did in 2017, when led by Jeremy Corbyn.
However, the former Home Secretary also said the Tories only had themselves to blame for their crushing defeat.
Ms Braverman did not mince her words when interviewed by Saurabh Sharma, President of the right-leaning American Moment think tank in the United States.
The MP for Fareham and Waterlooville, who was yesterday reported to be pondering a switch to Nigel Farage’s Reform UK, was asked to explain why former Prime Minister Rishi Sunak had been unable to clinch the votes of the British public.
She said: "This was not a victory for the Labour Party. The Labour Party actually polled fewer votes than Jeremy Corbyn did in 2017, when Labour lost the election.
"So this is not a glowing endorsement of the Labour Party and Keir Starmer. This is a wholesale rejection of the Conservative Party, our vote evaporated, so people either didn't come out to vote so there was a lower turnout and all our votes went to Reform."
Referring to 2019, when the Conservatives sealed an 80-seat majority, she explained: "We had a very strong and charismatic leader in the form of Boris Johnson, we had a very Conservative manifesto, we pledged to lower immigration to get Brexit done, to invest in parts of the country which had been neglected for decades and that was a winning formula.
"Unfortunately, we really didn't fulfill any of those promises. And the electorate saw that so when we went back to the electorate last week, they rightly displayed their unhappiness with us and that's why they didn't really vote for us, and the lesson from this election is that the British people rejected the Conservatives.
"What we really need to draw from this devastating result is that this was our failure, and we need to analyse why and how we failed."
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Ms Braverman, who has been talked about as a contender to replace Mr Sunak as Tory leader, added: "I believe it was on policy that we really failed on delivery of our promises.
"This is not about lurching to the right or lurching to the left. It's about doing what you say you're going to do, which we categorically failed to do.
"We didn't lower migration. It actually soared. We didn't cut taxation. Taxation was at a 70-year high and we didn't clamp down.
"We didn't build enough houses. And we didn't clamp down on the kind of politically correct virtue-signalling identity politics that has taken over our institutions.
"I'm afraid that's just the tip of the iceberg. There were many other policy failures."
