Suella Braverman rules herself out of Tory leadership contest

Suella Braverman has ruled herself out of the running to be the next leader of the Conservative Party.

The former home secretary said that while she had the backing needed to run in the leadership contest, she had chosen not to on this occasion.

James Cleverly, Tom Tugendhat and Mel Stride are among the Conservatives who have already announced their nominations to replace Rishi Sunak as party leader.

The prime minister said he would be stepping down from the role after losing the General Election earlier this month.

“Although I’m grateful to the ten MPs who wanted to nominate me for the leadership, getting on to the ballot is not enough,” Braverman wrote in an article for The Telegraph.

“There is, for good or for ill, no point in someone like me running to lead the Tory Party when most of the MPs disagree with my diagnosis and prescription.”

She said the party’s disastrous election result was down to failures on migration, taxes and “transgender ideology”.

She added: “I’ve been branded mad, bad and dangerous enough to see that the Tory Party does not want to hear this. And so I will bow out here.”

Braverman’s comments come as Kemi Bandenoch announced on Sunday that she would be throwing her name into the race to replace Sunak.

Writing in The Times, Badenoch said the party deserved to lose in the General Election because it was “unsure of who we were, what we were for and how we could build a new country”.

She wrote: “The country will not vote for us if we don’t know who we are or what we want to be.

“That is why I am seeking the leadership of the Conservative Party to renew our movement and, with the support of the British people, to get it to work for our country again.”