Suella Braverman has announced that she will not run to be the next leader of the Conservative Party.
The former Home Secretary said she got the backing she needed to run but has chosen not to.
Ms Braverman, who managed to hold her Fareham and Waterlooville seat during the Tories’ general election defeat, said: ‘Although I’m grateful to the 10 MPs who wanted to nominate me for the leadership, getting on to the ballot is not enough.
‘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.’
In an article for The Telegraph, she wrote that the party’s disastrous election result was down to failures on migration, taxes and ‘transgender ideology’.
Apologising to those who backed her to stand, she added: ‘I cannot run because I cannot say what people want to hear. I do not complain about this – it’s democracy in action and worked for Keir Starmer. 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.’
Her withdrawal came as shadow housing secretary Kemi Badenoch officially entered the leadership race to replace Rishi Sunak.
Ms Badenoch, who served as business and trade secretary in the last Government – is the sixth MP to put themselves forward and is the bookmakers’ favourite to take charge.
She joins James Cleverly, Tom Tugendhat, Robert Jenrick, Mel Stride and Priti Patel in launching their bids for leadership.
Announcing her candidacy her pledge to be honest with voters, Ms Badenoch wrote in The Times: ‘If I have the privilege to serve, we will speak the truth again.
‘That is why today my campaign is launching with an explicit focus on renewing our party for 2030 – the first full year we can be back in government and the first year of a new decade.
‘We will renew by starting from first principles: we can’t control immigration until we reconfirm our belief in the nation state and the sovereign duty it has, above all else, to serve its own citizens.’
She said that Britain’s public services will never fully recover from the pandemic until ‘we remember that government should do some things well, not everything badly’.
It comes 24 hours after Ms Patel became the fifth Tory MP to throw her hat in the ring.
She wrote on Twitter yesterday: ‘I am standing to be the new Leader of the Conservative Party. We must unite to win!
‘I can lead us in opposition and unite our party and get us match fit for the next election, with unity, experience and strength.’
She said she could deliver the ‘experienced and strong’ leadership needed to unite the Tories’ disparate factions, in an article for The Telegraph on Saturday.
As leader she would use the ‘huge talent pool…of Conservative Party members’ to ‘solve the big challenges that Labour, the Lib Dems and Reform don’t have answers to’, she wrote.
She said the party was a ‘grassroots movement’ that should work from from the bottom up rather than from the top down.
She wrote that ‘rebuilding trust with an electorate who have stopped listening to us will be tough’ and that the party must ‘reflect honestly on what went wrong’ while avoiding a ‘soap opera of finger-pointing and self-indulgence’.
Candidates needed to put themselves forward before nominations close at 2.30pm on Monday.
Contenders need a proposer, seconder and eight other backers to stand.
The parliamentary party will narrow the field down to four, who will make their case at the Conservative Party conference, which runs from September 29 to October 2.
The final two, picked by the parliamentary party, will then go to a vote of party members in an online ballot that will close on October 31 with the result announced on November 2.
Dame Priti is the least popular contender, at minus 28 points and seven points respectively, according to polling by Savanta carried out between July 19 and 21.
Mr Tugendhat is the most popular potential contender among both the public, at minus three points, and 2024 Conservative voters, at 21 points, the research shows.
Mr Cleverly is second in the running, Savanta’s findings suggest, at minus nine points with the public and 19 points among 2024 Conservative voters.