Theresa May: Liz Truss and Boris Johnson to blame for Tory failure

Theresa May has accused Boris Johnson and Liz Truss of destroying the Conservative Party’s popularity but argued the disaster of her 2017 election campaign showed Rishi Sunak could still win the next election.

The former prime minister took aim at the “expectation of celebrity” in modern politics as she blamed social media for driving polarisation and an increasing threat to democracy.

Speaking to journalists in Westminster, May praised Sunak for stabilising the government but aimed a series of barbs at her two other successors.

She also reiterated her criticisms of Sunak’s Rwanda policy, which she warned made it harder to help victims of modern slavery, and cautioned her party against leaving the European Court of Human Rights, which she insisted was “reformable”.

May is standing down at the next election after 27 years in parliament but insisted the result was not a “foregone conclusion”, comparing the attitude of voters with those when she was first elected. “Keir Starmer is not Tony Blair. The view on those doorsteps is different to the feel pre-1997,” she said.

Pointing to this month’s local election results, in which Labour did not make as many gains as the Tories did losses, she said: “The message from that was a bit of ‘a plague on all your houses’.”

May’s government was fatally weakened after she called a snap election in 2017 on the back of encouraging opinion polls, only to lose the Conservative majority as Labour’s popularity surged during the campaign.

Suggesting this was a sign Sunak should not be written off, May said: “We’ve seen one or two unexpected election results in general elections. I was probably 20 points ahead, the Conservatives 20 points ahead in most of the election campaign for the 2017 election, and look what happened to that.”

She insisted: “Against the background of the economy improving, I think it is not a foregone conclusion.”

Asked why the Conservatives were so unpopular, she said: “Obviously we’ve been in for 14 years, and it’s always harder for a party that’s been in government for a significant period of time.”

However, she went on to pin the blame firmly on her two immediate successors, pointing to the Downing Street parties scandal under Johnson and Truss’s tax-cutting mini-budget which prompted a market meltdown.

“Let’s face it, with Boris the lockdown parties exacerbated a sense, that was already there from people, of it was one rule for MPs and another rule for them. And then with Liz, what happened with the markets, that just disrupted the sense that this was a party of economic management”.

She said that voters had seen “quite a bit of change under us and things happening. They wanted some stability, and I think Rishi has brought that stability.”

After warning about the dangers of populism, May was asked if this applied to any of her successors. “There’s an element of politics today, which comes into the populism issue, which is a sort of expectation of celebrity. And I think certainly you could say that.”

Arguing for a more selfless conception of politics, she said: “There is a real need for us as politicians to instil that sense of service.” Being prime minister “is a position of service, not of power”.

Praising the current prime minister, she said: “He is having success in relation to the economy, as we’ve seen from GDP and inflation and hopefully interest rates in the summer. And I think bringing that stability in has been critical. And being willing to say ‘actually I’m here to get the job done’.”

Social media was a driver of “a corrosion in the quality of debate and more coarseness in the debate of our politics”, she said. It “amplifies extreme views” and made nuance harder, she argued. “I do worry about the polarisation of politics, the absolutist world we live in, and the coarseness of debate, and the way in which today it is much harder to debate different views civilly and respectfully.”

Populism had prospered by offering “easy answers” at a time when voters were struggling. “There is an issue about whether politicians have been delivering for people,” May said.

“The Brexit vote wasn’t just about Europe. It was actually people voting for a change, because they thought politicians were sufficiently listening to them.”

She said that although Donald Trump was “unpredictable”, whoever won the election would be able to forge a relationship based on common interests and persuade him to change his mind.

Referring to a famous visit to the White House in which President Trump was seen grasping her hand, she said: “I’m not sure whether I’m going to be known most as the prime minister who didn’t get Brexit through or the prime minister whose hand Donald Trump held.”