Former Conservative MP Sir John Redwood has called on the party’s leadership candidates to focus on learning the errors of the last government rather than on Nigel Farage.
The party grandee said he wanted candidates to be 'realistic' about the size of the problem the party was facing.
Speaking on GB News Sir John Redwood said: “I think it would be better if the leadership candidates and the Conservative Party concentrated on what the government got wrong and why it was that so many people either went to vote Reform or stayed at home.
“I certainly found during that election, and the polls bore it out, that the Tory vote roughly halved from 2019 to the latest election, and most of them didn't go off and vote Labour or Liberal.
“The Labour vote actually fell, and the Liberal vote stayed at a very low level. Suddenly, from nowhere, Reform got 14% and turnout fell about 10%. So we know that most of the disgruntled Conservatives either voted Reform or they stayed at home.
“So the leadership candidates should concentrate on ‘why did that happen?’ And if they stayed in the government throughout the period, as four of them, did they have a particularly difficult task to explain why they didn't notice all the things that were going wrong. Why they didn't believe the opinion polls, which were telling us for a couple of years that we were going to be wiped out, and why they didn't do something about it.
“Because some of us on the back benches were constantly having conversations with them and other members of the government saying, ‘for goodness sake, control immigration. For goodness sake, improve the economy rather more. For goodness sake, get tax rates down because you put them up too high.’
“The things that would have actually won some of those voters back, but they obstinately refused to do it.”
Commenting on Kemi Badenoch’s comments from 2018, he said: “It was a statement in the House of Commons so we can all check that she actually said it. But I think that's the less serious criticism.
“I think the more serious criticism is she and the three others who stayed in the government knew that a group of us were telling them that a considerable chunk of Conservative electorate was extremely angry that we had stood for election in 2019 on getting total migration down from around 200,000 which it was then, to a lower figure. And it actually hit a peak of 740,000. It was completely unacceptable.
“And they wouldn't accept amendments and proposals that we were putting to them as a collective government to do something about it.
“It was only towards the end, in January of this year, that the Prime Minister saw the point and made some changes to the rules over how you qualify to get into this country legally, which are now having quite an impact on the numbers. But it was a bit late, and then he didn't allow a year to show the public this was actually going to work and make quite a difference to the numbers.
“And meanwhile, the other members of Cabinet who are now trying to become leader of the Conservative Party had not been speaking out and have not been recommending such action, and indeed, rather more action than the government took.
“I'm challenging the leadership contenders to get rather more realistic about the hole that the Conservative Party has found itself in.
“The Conservative Party only got 24% of the vote in the last general election, and Labour only got 34% of the vote because they were actually losing votes. And they were unpopular as well because people thought there was quite a lot of similarity between the policies the Conservatives had been practising and quite a lot of the policies which Labour would have carried on with or are now carrying on with.
“And so yes, there's a massive disconnect between the consensus policies the two main parties have been following and where the bulk of the electorate has moved to.
“And that's why I think the challenge has to be to these leaders who want our votes in due course in the membership part of the contest to be rather more searching and rather more apologetic about what the government got wrong.
“Because clearly it got quite a lot of things wrong, and then show how they can rebuild with a sensible Conservative proposition, and above all, how they are going to oppose this government.
“Because what I'm quite sure is this government is going to make things worse in many cases, not better. So, there is a very important role that His Majesty’s Opposition, and it is a privilege for those in Parliament to be leading the opposition, they've got to do it well, because that might improve the government.”
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