By Ben Kerrigan-
Culture Secretary Nadine Dorries has blamed Rishi Sunak for the “ruthless coup” which saw Boris Johnson resign as prime minister of the Uk.
Ms Dorries, an avid supporter of Boris Johnson, named Tory leadership hopeful , Mr Sunak, as the ringleader in removing the Prime Minister from Downing Street, adding that she was “bitterly disappointed” by Mr Johnson’s resignation.
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The Tory leadership contest has descended into open warfare with Liz Truss and Rishi Sunak’s camps trading barbs and trashing each other’s records in Government.
Ms Dorries claimed Mr Sunak had partly engineered the PM’s downfall, attacking the chancellor’s credibility as she discredited his opulent lifestyle. She made her support for Liz Truss obvious, amid the acrimony between Truss and Rishi Sunak’s camps exchanging strong words and trashing each other’s records in Government during the recent televised debates.
She told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme: “I am bitterly disappointed that Boris Johnson was removed by a ruthless coup, as he was, led largely by Rishi Sunak.”
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The Culture Secretary, who is backing Ms Truss, railed against the ousting of a “great leader” and said it had “unleashed the hounds of hell” in a round of interviews.
“Removing a sitting Prime Minister who won us an 80-seat majority less than three years ago, who took us through Covid and led the world in the response to the war in Ukraine – defenestrating that Prime Minister was never going to be a clean or easy thing for anyone to do.
“It was always going to have repercussions. I think I said at the very beginning we kind of unleashed the hounds of hell in doing that.”
Mr Sunak’s shock resignation – minutes after Health Secretary Sajid Javid also quit sparked a number of ministerial departures, eventually forcing the PM to admit defeat.
The allegation, which has not been denied by Sunak in two ways. Either he did a smart job of getting rid of Johnson, whose popularity among U voters was falling, or Sunak is a conniving devil who cannot himself be trusted to be loyal. In Sunak’s resignation letter to the prime minister, he claimed to have been ”loyal” to him. If the claims of a plotted coup are true, then Sunak is a liar, who indeed secretly plotted Johnson’s fall.
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Accused of plotting Johnson’s fall : Rushi Sunak Image: NDTV.com
Ambitions
There are rumours that the prime minister still nurtures ambitions to stage a remarkable comeback to power, by adding his name to the voting ballot and do a Winston Churchill special.
Churchill was a British statesman, soldier and writer, who served as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from 1940 to 1945, during the Second World War, and again from 1951 to 1955.
Downing Street has denied that the prime minister has any intentions of returning to power by adding his name to voting ballots, but it would be a comeback of remarkable proportions if Johnson were to test his popularity in parliament by doing just that, and actually succeeding.
In such an event, Johnson will go in the history books as one hell of a politician, but still have the monumental task of impressing and convincing the British public that he is fit to lead the country having stepped down from power in light of all the reasons that led to it, and the fall out from partygate.
The prime minister may well have something planned up his sleeves if indeed he believes Sunak plotted his downfall, but only time will tell. As things stand, the next prime minister will be between Liz Truss and Rushi Sunak.
In a speech to the Commonwealth Business Forum in Birmingham, the outgoing prime minister seemed to confirm that political power would definitely be changing hands. He said: “We come now to the next stage in the great relay race of politics. I didn’t think it was meant to be a relay race, by the way, when I started.
“I can assure you that the baton is going to be passed seamlessly and invisibly to the hand of somebody else.”
He added: “I’ll give you this assurance – they will continue with the same programme, cutting taxes, simplifying regulation as much as possible, taking advantage of all our new regulatory freedoms, getting rid of every encumbrance from solvency to MiFID to VAT on fuel.”
This “turns out to be easier than we thought”, Mr Johnson remarked.
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