Sir Simon Clarke sent off his piece to the Telegraph and he made it clear that he doesn’t think Rishi Sunak is the right person to lead the Conservative Party.
Now Simon is a really first-class individual. I worked very closely with him on Boris Johnson’s campaign which we won in the end and had a very distinguished leader as a result.
But on this, he may be a good man but he’s not a wise man. The Tory Party has already made itself look foolish by changing leader as often as some people change their shirts.
You cannot carry on having a new leader and getting further and further away from that mandate that we won in 2019.
It seems to me that any new leader at this stage would have to go pretty much straight to an election. It’s disrespectful to the voters to keep on changing leader and getting further from that mandate.
But the electorate doesn’t like parties that cannot make their mind up about what they’re trying to do.
I didn’t support Rishi Sunak for the leadership but he won it, he’s got it and he is trying to do certain things which he set out clearly.
What are they? Well, first of all, he’s having some success getting the public finances in order. And that’s been tough and sometimes I’ve criticised him for the way he’s done it.
But actually, it now looks as if there may be some money to cut taxes. So surely we should be giving him the chance to do that.
He’s made changes, most importantly, to legal migration so the numbers there can begin to come down as the British public wants to see. And we have to allow him the freedom to take the party into a general election so that the voter can choose.
Yes, I would like to see Rishi Sunak pushing more for conservative policies.
Now what do I mean by that? In a funny way, I mean, let Sunak be Sunak.
Because I think the real Rishi Sunak is quite a true Conservative believer; he believes in the small state he admired the late Nigel Lawson. He wanted to be a Chancellor in Nigel Lawson’s mould.
We’ve only got a few months to an election. The Tory Party will be ruined if it is divided, if it squabbles amongst itself, if it changes leader once again.
The polls are not currently very encouraging. But what we want is good conservatism and people back the leader for the time being.
Anything else is a distraction and makes it more likely that we get Keir Starmer, higher taxes and bigger state and creeping Europeanisation.
