A former Tory cabinet member has claimed Rishi Sunak will ‘disappear to California’ if he loses the General Election.
Zac Goldsmith also warned the majority of his party’s MPs will lose their job after July 4. The Tory peer, who quit the Cabinet last year with a scathing attack on the PM’s environmental record, said he “understood” why Tories are angry over the snap election.
The Conservatives trail Labour by around 20 percentage points in the polls and are tipped for a drubbing after local election misery last month. It has led to frustration among Tory MPs about the decision to call a snap poll rather than waiting until the autumn.
In an extraordinary attack on Mr Sunak, Lord Goldsmith said he hopes there are “at least some decent MPs” left to rebuild the party if the PM heads off to the US. Mr Sunak and his family own a home in Santa Monica and he held a US Green Card until 2021.
Lord Goldsmith posted on Twitter /X: “I understand the anger towards Sunak, who has damaged the party almost beyond repair and all but guaranteed the majority of his MPs will lose their job next month.
“But it’s hard to muster much sympathy given that none of this would have happened without the complicity of a majority of the party and what is now unfolding was entirely predictable – indeed predicted. The hope is that when Sunak disappears off to California in a few weeks there are at least some decent MPs left around which to rebuild.”
But Mr Sunak has hit back, saying he’s got no intention of quitting the UK. He said last night: “I’m surprised that Lord Goldsmith who I don’t think I’ve spoken to in a very long time seems to have some sort of intimate knowledge of my family’s arrangements.”
And asked if he planned to head to America, he suggested the lure of Premier League for Southampton – the team he’s supported since he was a boy – is too much of a draw. He said: “Of course not, my kids are at school, this is my home and as I said earlier my football team just got promoted to the Premier League so I intend to spend many more happy days watching them at St Mary’s.
“I was born and brought up in Southampton, I was raised with a very strong ethic of service to one’s community, that’s what I believe, that’s what I’ve always done.” And asked if he would do a full five years as an MP even if he’s kicked out of No10, he responded: “That’s what I’m here to do.”
It is the latest in a very public feud between Lord Goldsmith and Mr Sunak. The PM ordered the then-cabinet member to apologise after he was criticised in a Privileges Committee report for undermining the Partygate probe into Boris Johnson.
Lord Goldsmith quit his ministerial role the following day, writing in a scathing letter: “The problem is not that the Government is hostile to the environment, it is that you, our Prime Minister, are simply uninterested. That signal, or lack of it, has trickled down through Whitehall and caused a kind of paralysis.”
Mr Sunak shot back in a letter that Lord Goldsmith had been asked to apologised for sharing a post describing the probe into Mr Johnson a “witch hunt”, but saying he’d decided to “take a different course”.