Tory mayor concedes party will take ‘years’ to rebuild as ‘country doesn’t care’

But after a crushing General Election loss in July, Houchen said his party has much to ponder as they convene in Birmingham for the annual conference.

“People aren’t stupid. We can see what we did wrong”, he told GB News.

“The question for the leadership contenders that none of them have been able to set out yet is how do you create unity in a Conservative Party that doesn’t know what it stands for at the minute?

“How do you get the trust and confidence of the country back? First of all, it doesn’t matter who we elect on 2 November, how do we get the country to listen to us?

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“The country doesn’t country that this conference is going on. They don’t want to hear from the Conservative Party at the minute.

“Nobody is particularly bothered who the leader is. So whoever it is, their first task is going to be getting the public just to listen again, not even getting them onside.

“It’s just to give us a fair hearing where we can start to establish what we’re actually about, what a new Conservative Party is about.

“That’s the biggest challenge. That is something that we shouldn’t underestimate. That’s going to take, I think, years, rather than weeks and months.”

Kemi Badenoch, Robert Jenrick, Tom Tugendhat and James Cleverly are bidding to accrue as much support as possible from their colleagues and party members at the Tory conference.

The party won 121 seats at the general election in July, down hundreds on their 2019 election results.

Former Prime Minister Liz Truss waded in on the battle yesterday, saying none of the candidates have acknowledged “how bad things are” for the party.

She told the in-conversation event: “So far, I haven’t seen any of the candidates really acknowledge how bad things are in the country as a whole, and frankly, for the Conservative Party.”

“They think ‘all we need to do is show competence and we will be ushered back into office’,” Ms Truss said, adding: “They have to explain what went wrong, why things are so bad for the Conservatives and what they’re actually going to do.”