Suella Braverman has taken a fresh swipe at Rishi Sunak, claiming her attempts to lower legal migration were ‘blocked’.
The former home secretary, who is expected to stand in the Tory leadership race, said she ‘made the case’ but the then-prime minister did not agree with her.
It comes after Mr Sunak was said to have personally called all 175 colleagues who lost their seats last week to apologise.
Today Mrs Braverman told GB News that Mr Sunak had given her an assurance that he would ‘work with me to lower legal migration and cut the number of visas’.
But she said: ‘Unfortunately, I was blocked… I just wanted to deliver a manifesto commitment to lower overall migration.
‘But if the Prime Minister doesn’t agree with you, if no one around the Cabinet table agrees with you, you’re not getting anywhere. And that is the reality that I came up against.
‘Could I have tried harder? I struggled. I struggled privately for 12 months, biting my lip, supporting the Prime Minister, trying to persuade from the inside. He didn’t agree with me.’
Mrs Braverman said she was ‘very concerned about the exponential rise in immigration’, and said she was the ‘only one around the Cabinet table who was moving, mobilised and motivated’ on legal migration figures.
Her comments will be seen as a swipe at her rivals for the likely Tory leadership.
But Mr Sunak, who remains Conservative party leader, now faces calls to remove her chances of winning the leadership contest by expelling her from the party following remarks she made about the LGBTQ+ flag earlier this week.
The Fareham MP branded the LGBTQ+ Progress Pride flag as ‘horrible’ and ‘monstrous’.
She hit out at ‘far, far too many Tory politicians’ who wanted the flag flown in Whitehall to show ‘how liberal and progressive we are’.
Mrs Braverman, moaned she was too enfeebled as a minister to get the flag removed from her own department.
