Tory leadership hopeful Rory Stewart says party must not 'try to outdo Farage'
Rory Stewart says Theresa May should not quit, and that even George Clooney could not charm his way through Brexit.
Monday 6 May 2019 09:36, UK
The new International Development Secretary has warned the Conservative Party against "trying to outdo Nigel Farage", while admitting he wants to be its next leader.
Asked whether he would be throwing his hat in the ring when a vacancy for the top job arises, Rory Stewart said simply: "Yes."
When Sky's Sophy Ridge asked how he could remain a loyalist, despite being open about his ambitions, he replied: "I think you've just got to be straight.
"If people feel that they would like to get into that competition they should say so, and we should talk about what we believe in."
Despite being open about his desire to lead the country, Mr Stewart, 46, said he "really strongly disagrees" with the idea that Theresa May should announce her resignation.
He explained: "I think this idea that somehow it's all to do with an individual is naive.
"This is about Brexit - this is about the fact we have a country which is divided right down the middle."
He evoked Hollywood as he summed up the difficulty of balancing competing Brexit interests.
"I don't think anybody doing that role (of PM) - I don't think if some sort of superhero turned up - if George Clooney suddenly became prime minister - I don't think he'd be able to charm his way through this problem," he said.
"The problem is not the individual."
Mr Stewart warned against the Tories trying to emulate Nigel Farage's Brexit Party, pointing out that while most Brexit voters opted for the Tories at the 2017 election, so did four million Remain voters.
He told Sophy Ridge on Sunday that the Conservative Party should not "make the mistake of trying to outdo Nigel Farage", saying it was something "a few of my colleagues are talking about".
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Were that to happen, he said the Tories would "lose those four million Remain voters, we'd lose young people, we'd lose Scotland, we'd lose London, and we'd lose a lot of the most energetic parts of this country."
He added: "We've got to be a broad party - we've got to be able to stretch all the way from Ken Clarke, right the way through to Jacob Rees-Mogg."
Mr Stewart was prisons minister before being asked to head the Department for International Development following the sacking of former Defence Secretary Gavin Williamson.
After graduating from Oxford, he worked for the Foreign Office.
In 2003, he became deputy governor of a province of Iraq, writing a book about his experience called Occupational Hazards: My Time Governing in Iraq.