‘Reveal yourselves’, George Osborne tells secret Tory leadership plotters

George Osborne has called on the people suspected of orchestrating a plot to unseat Rishi Sunak to reveal themselves, warning they are casting a “big shadow” over the Conservative party.

Mr Osborne said the mystery around the Conservative Britain Alliance, which was behind a bombshell YouGov poll in the Daily Telegraph warning of a Tory landslide defeat on the scale of 1997, was fuelling the bad blood in the party.

Former cabinet minister Sir Simon Clarke’s call for Mr Sunak to resign is also being linked to the plot – although he has insisted he was acting alone.

Mr Osborne, a former chancellor and one of the key figures behind the modernisation of the Conservative Party nearly two decades ago, warned it would be a “huge mistake” to replace Mr Sunak with another leader who had brought “order and sense after years of chaos to the leadership of the Tory party”.

But Mr Osborne also acknowledged that the Prime Minister had been weakened because he had failed to gain ground on Labour in the polls since arriving in Downing Street more than a year ago.

Speaking to Ed Balls on their Political Currency podcast, Mr Osborne said: “The only leadership strategy that works in the Tory party is having a poll lead.

“The only thing that works as a unifying strategy is the promise that you might win the election. And you can announce any amount of policy, you can make any amount of promises to the Conservative party.

“If you don’t look like you’re going to win, you’re going to have huge leadership problems. And I think this is a sign of that.

“Simon Clarke’s intervention is a sign that, you know, the party is not persuaded, partly because of this opinion poll funded by the Conservative Britain Alliance, by whom we don’t know, the Conservative Party at the moment thinks it’s going to lose. And that is very destabilising for the leadership.”

He said who had paid for the YouGov poll was “a big unanswered question of British politics”, adding: “What this really speaks to is just how sort of steeped in the blood the Conservative party has been over recent years.

“There have been so many turnovers of leadership and so many kind of assassinations, that everyone is complicit. So, you know, if you were a Boris Johnson supporter, you’d say ‘Sunak is an assassin, Sunak led a coup.’ Or if you were Simon Clarke, you’d say ‘well, you know, Sunak was unhelpful in the bringing down of Liz Truss’…

“So it’s very hard for the leadership to call for unity when they themselves became the leaders on the back of a coup.

“This is this sort of shadowy group […] that Simon is somehow part of that seems to have commissioned this big opinion poll which we’ve talked about on the show before, but it’s still casting a big shadow over Conservative politics.”