Braverman says Sunak needs to ‘own’ responsibility for election resultsIn her interview with the BBC’s Sunday with Laura Kuenssberg, Suella Braverman, the former home secretary, also said that Rishi Sunak needed to “own” responsibility for the local election results. She said:
Rishi Sunak has been leading us for about 18 months, he has been making these decisions, these are consequences of those decisions. He needs to own this, and therefore he needs to fix it.
She also claimed Tory voters were “on strike”.
I think the problem is that our voters are on strike, they are not coming out to support us, we have seen that with turnouts and we have seen that with losing Conservative strongholds.
(If Conservative voters were public sector workers, the government would be able to use its Strikes (Minimum Services Levels) Act to require some of them to show up. Unfortunately this is not an option for Sunak.)
In her interview Braverman said Sunak should respond to the results with policies like tax cuts and a cap on legal migration.
Asked for evidence that a shift to the right would help the party, Braverman replied:
The evidence is that people are not voting for what [Sunak] is doing because they don’t believe that we are serious about some of these issues.
Asked if she regretted supporting Sunak for the Tory leadership in 2022, Braverman replied: “Honestly, yes I do.”