He blamed his own party’s recent record of infighting for putting voters off. The public, he said, were sick of the “endless political soap opera” and the “internal rivalries and divisions” that warring Conservatives have played out in public. “It’s not so much that Labour won this election, but rather that the Conservatives have lost it,” said Shapps.
Penny Mordaunt, who had been tipped as a potential future leader, also lost her seat in the Southern English coastal town of Portsmouth. Her party, Mordaunt said, had “taken a battering.”
Mordaunt, who earned international fame carrying the sword of state during King Charles’ coronation last year, warned Tories not to learn the wrong lessons from their crushing defeat. Conservatives should not indulge in “talking to an ever smaller slice of ourselves” but instead reconnect with voters “if we want again to be the natural party of government.”
Five Tory prime ministers in eight years
The Conservatives had been in power continuously since 2010 and they changed leader repeatedly, during a period of unprecedented turmoil for the country.
After a relatively stable five years in coalition with the Liberal Democrats, Cameron’s Tories won a surprise majority in 2015 and had no choice but to deliver their election pledge on holding an “in-out” referendum on Britain’s membership of the European Union. That unleashed a political civil war that changed U.K. and European politics permanently.
In the eight years since the Brexit vote, there have been five Tory prime ministers, along with scores of ministers first joining, then being fired or resigning from government as the party lurched from scandal to crisis and back again.
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