Penny
Mordaunt and Grant Shapps among slew of Tory cabinet ministers unseated
Defeated
Tories turn ire on party as Alex Chalk and Gillian Keegan also among list of
ousted ministers
Eleni Courea
and Kiran Stacey
Fri 5 Jul
2024 05.25 BST
The
Conservatives are reeling from a catastrophic night in which a record number of
cabinet ministers have lost their seats with the party on course for its worst
election result since it was founded.
Gillian
Keegan, the education secretary, Grant Shapps, the defence secretary, and Penny
Mordaunt, the Commons leader, were among the most high-profile cabinet
ministers unseated by opposition candidates.
Alex Chalk,
the justice secretary, Lucy Frazer, the culture secretary, and Michelle
Donelan, the science secretary, were also ousted. Eight cabinet ministers have
lost their seats so far, beating the previous record of seven in 1997.
The Tories
were forecast to lose 241 seats in total while Labour was predicted to achieve
a massive 170-seat majority, according to the exit poll for the BBC, ITV and
Sky. Labour was confirmed to have won a majority at 5am.
Rishi Sunak
conceded defeat nationally in a speech in his constituency, saying the British
public had delivered “a sobering verdict”.
“The Labour
party has won this general election and I have called Sir Keir Starmer to
congratulate him on his victory,” the prime minister said. “The British people
have delivered a sobering verdict tonight. There is much to learn and reflect
on and I take responsibility for the loss.”
Several
senior Tories were re-elected with severely depleted majorities. Jeremy Hunt,
the chancellor, clung on to his Godalming and Ash seat by just 891 votes in the
face of a major challenge from the Liberal Democrats. Hunt said the results
nationally were a “bitter pill to swallow”.
Richard
Holden, the Tory chair, won Basildon and Billericay by just 20 votes over
Labour following a recount. He had faced heavy criticism from his own side
after he was selected in the hitherto safe Tory seat at the last minute, 300
miles away from his former constituency.
Kemi
Badenoch, the business secretary and potential Tory leadership candidate, won
Essex North West by 2,610 votes, down from a majority of 27,594 in her former
seat of Saffron Walden.
Other senior
Tory figures who were ousted included the former business secretary Jacob
Rees-Mogg; Johnny Mercer, the veterans minister; the former deputy prime
minister Thérèse Coffey, the former business secretary Simon Clarke and the
former justice secretary Robert Buckland.
Tory
grandees and candidates said the results amounted to a repudiation of their
party that called for major change. The former party leader William Hague said
it was a “catastrophic” night.
The losses
have narrowed the field of potential Tory leaders vying to replace Sunak.
Mordaunt and Shapps were both said to be preparing bids. Some grandees called
for the Conservative party to swing to the right and even suggested it could
work with Nigel Farage’s Reform UK party, which won at least four seats and
came second in a host of constituencies.
Shapps hit
out at Conservative divisions during his concession speech, blaming his
colleagues for losing the support of voters across the country. “We’ve tried
the patience of traditional Conservative voters with a propensity to create an
endless political soap opera out of internal rivalries and divisions, which
have become increasingly indulgent and entrenched,” he said.
He issued a
warning to his party, saying: “There is a danger that we now go off on some
tangent condemning ourselves and the public to years of lacklustre opposition
that fails to hold a government to account effectively,” he said. “We must not
let this happen.”
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Shapps was
not the only defeated candidate to warn against the party shifting to the right
in a potentially divisive attempt to win back Reform voters. In her speech
after losing in Portsmouth North, Mordaunt said: “Our renewal as a party of a
country will not be achieved by us by talking to an ever-smaller slice of
ourselves, but by being guided by the people of this country.” Buckland said in
his concession speech that such a move “would be a disastrous mistake and it
would send us into the abyss, and gift Labour government for many years”.
He launched
an attack on prospective Tory leadership contenders, telling the BBC: “I’ve
watched colleagues in the Conservative party strike poses, write inflammatory
op-eds, and say stupid things they know they have no evidence for, instead of
concentrating on doing the job. I’m fed up of personal agendas and jockeying
for position.”
He added:
“The Conservatives are facing electoral Armageddon. And it’s going to be like a
group of bald men fighting over a comb.”
Other senior
figures argued that the Conservatives had to reclaim the centre ground. The
former chancellor George Osborne said working with Reform would be a
“disastrous route to go down”.
Jo Johnson,
the Tory peer and universities minister, told the BBC it was a mistake for the
Conservatives to try to be “Reform lite”.
However,
others suggested the party should work more closely with Reform. Rees-Mogg, who
was defeated by Labour in his seat, said the Conservative party “took its core
vote for granted” and that it had been wrong for Tory MPs to oust Boris Johnson
when he had been elected by the country. “Failing to deliver on Conservative
core principles did us a lot of harm,” he told the BBC.
Asked
whether he thought the Tories should have sought to join forces with Farage,
Rees-Mogg said: “We are where we are and the disaster doesn’t seem to have been
averted. You’ll have to ask Nigel what his plans are. I think he looks for and
seeks a realignment of the right in British politics, and it will be
interesting to see whether he can achieve that.”
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