Rishi Sunak hit out at the Conservatives who are still supporting Boris Johnson, accusing them of wearing “rose tinted glasses” on Monday.
The former chancellor and now Tory leadership hopeful has struggled in the polls against opponent Liz Truss recently, as Johnson backers flock to her.
There’s also a body of grassroot campaigners who want Johnson to stay on as PM, despite being ousted by his own MPs – including Sunak – last month.
Speaking to Radio 4′s Today programme, Sunak claimed: “I do think there’s a risk that people are looking at the last few months of government with slightly rose tinted glasses about what it was really like, because it wasn’t working as it should and crucially the government found itself on the wrong side of a very serious ethical issue.
“And for me, also, going down the wrong economic path.”
The UK is currently facing a 40-year-high for inflation rates and the slowest economic growth among G7 nations.
It’s worth pointing out that Sunak had actually been the chancellor of the exchequer for more than two years when he quit, and had been a senior figure within the Treasury since Johnson became prime minister in July 2019.
Still, he reminded listeners that more than 60 Tory MPs resigned from Johnson’s government at the start of July.
Host Nick Robinson replied: “You mean that Boris Johnson’s behaviour, his conduct, made it unacceptable for him to carry on – is that right?”
Sunak hesitated, but added that it was this, “alongside economic policy”, which pushed him to remove his support for Johnson.
He explained: “I was very clear in my letter that I tried as hard as I could to make it work.
“If people want to wear rose tinted spectacles about what happened in government, that’s up to them, but they have to recognise that 60 members of parliament resigned from government because they thought what was happening wasn’t right – and I was one of them.”
Sunak refused to be drawn on the controversy which emerged over the weekend around Nadine Dorries’ Twitter feed.
One of Johnson’s most loyal supporters, she retweeted an edited image of Sunak wielding the knife into the outgoing prime minister’s back, in the famous scene from Julius Caesar where his closest allies kill him.