Brexit caused the Tory infighting that will cost us the election, ex minister says

Paul Scully MP on the roof terrace of the buillding which houses his Westminster Office (Photo: Tom Pilston)

Voters will think the Tories have “lost our marbles” if they try to replace Rishi Sunak after next month’s local elections, says former minister Paul Scully.

The 56-year-old Sutton MP agrees bad results will cause “palpitations” particularly if the Tories lose Andy Street and Ben Houchen, their high profile mayors, but says deposing Sunak would be ‘mad’.

“If we start changing the leader now I can’t think what the public would think…They would think we’ve lost our marbles.”

Scully has no reason to love the prime minister who sacked him from his ministerial positions last November and did little to help his subsequent bid to become the Tories’ mayoral candidate for London’s mayor. Scully served as Minister for London from February 2020 and Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Tech and the Digital Economy from October 2022.

But having announced his decision to stand down as an MP last month Scully has opted to tell his party a few home truths – particularly about the dangers of speaking to an ever diminishing audience and in-fighting.

“If we just focus on core vote, eventually that core shrinks to nothing,” he posted on X recently. “Talk more about housing; renting first because home ownership has drifted too far from so many. Show a real connection and empathy with other generations. Otherwise we risk pushing ourselves into an ideological cul-de-sac.”

“The standard deviation model is true in politics. Most people are in the middle. We can work with the bell curve or become the bell-ends. We need to make that decision. I fear the electorate already is!”

So what should Sunak say to convince all voters that the Tories aren’t just a lobbying group for older, home-owners?

“The first thing is that it really has to say something, I am being slightly flippant, but literally at the moment I am not hearing anything.”

He says his party shouldn’t allow Labour to grab the agenda on planning reform but drive ahead with radical moves to promote housebuilding. Similarly he wants to see more done for renters including improving pay and job security.

Scully acknowledges, however, that the latest watering down of legislation to improve the rights of leaseholders was a consequence of “short termism and vested interest”.

He says the Conservatives have lost their genius for internal coalition building. “The foundations got knocked somewhere and until we get that back, having that loose coalition, of realising that politics is the art of the possible you are never going to get anywhere.

“Whoever the next leader they have to be the leader of what is currently an unleadable party,” he says.

How did it come to this? Scully, himself an ardent Brexiter, blames the rancour of that debate.

“What we saw through the Brexit years when parliament was in stasis..was lots of people saying things that couldn’t be unsaid.”

“The problem is that it becomes easier to do that the next time and the next time. Since then we’ve had arguments about our approach to lockdown, the economy, any number of things. They are not looking for ways to get together but to drag the party in their mould.”

Even when Tories are addressing genuine concerns, he says, too often they do so with language aimed at a very narrow group of people.

“If you look at some of the stuff Suella [Braverman] and others have said about immigration the kernel of it is not wrong.” The wrapping, on the other hand, alienates “big groups of people”.

Ads attacking London as crime-ridden from Susan Hall, the woman who beat Scully to contest the capital’s mayoralty, were ill-judged. “It just needed a basic sense-check.”

Winning the party leadership by appealing to its “ideological purity” will only ensure defeat at a general election, he says. “You are going to be condemned to be leader of the opposition.”

“The biggest fear I have is that people just stop listening to us. You just end up talking to a smaller subset of the Conservative Party.”

Scully believes he may have been sacked because he had let it be known he was thinking of standing down as an MP. The dismissal felt “brutal”.

He recounts how he was five minutes into an online meeting with Michael Gove when saw the chief whip’s number flash up on his phone. He paused the meeting to take the call assuming it was just a courtesy to inform him he was staying put – but never returned. “I got up, hugged my private secretary and left.”

A damaging feature of politics, he says, is that party management means quiet, collegiate competence prospers far less than spiky, awkward trouble-making. But unless the Tories find some team spirit from somewhere they are doomed he says.

“We’ve talked a lot about what happens next and next leaders but that’s kind of for another day. You can win 4-3 in extra time after you’ve been three nil down at half time but only if you’re all attacking the same goal, if you’re punching one another on the half-way line you’ve got no chance.”