A Conservative MP has delivered a short blast at her party under Rishi Sunak after becoming the latest Tory to announce they are quitting before the general election.
Lucy Allan, MP for Telford, joins the likes of Nadine Dorries, Matt Hancock and Sajid Javid heading for the exit doors in a sign of the party’s diminished expectations of election success next year.
Allan, first elected in 2015, released a statement on Thursday that suggested little by way of frustration, focussing on what had been achieved for her constituency.
But later on Twitter, she was less guarded with her words.
In reply to former HuffPost UK journalist Paul Waugh tweeting that Telford was where Boris Johnson launched the party’s 2019 manifesto, and was previously held by Labour, she wrote: “Yep, didn’t have to be that way, today’s Conservative Party is just not interested in seats like Telford anymore.”
Allan won the seat from Labour with a slim 730-vote majority, which was squeezed to 720 in 2017. But that was extended to a majority of 10,941 at the 2019 vote.
With the opinion polls consistently pointing to a Labour victory in 2024, the expectation is that increasing numbers of Conservatives will conclude that their personal interests are best served outside parliament.
“I think you’re probably looking at 60 Tory MPs standing down at the next election,” one former minister told HuffPost UK last month.
The exodus threatens to deprive the Tories of many experienced campaigners and Commons performers.
Former deputy prime minister Dominic Raab and 1922 committee chairman Sir Graham Brady are also on their way out. Johnson himself has already gone, but that’s more to do with his individual circumstances than the party’s cratering poll rating.