TORY party members refused to let Theresa May ignore the disastrous local election results in England yesterday.
“Why don’t you resign?” shouted one furious activist as the Prime Minister tried to address the Welsh party conference.
The heckler, later identified as Stuart Davies, a former Tory councillor and press officer for Boris Johnson, shouted “we don’t want you here”.
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As he was escorted from the room, May told the crowd: “It’s great to be back in North Wales again – I have to say my experience of North Wales is that everybody I meet here is friendly.”
In many ways, Davies’s intervention was one of the politest the Prime Minister faced. With results showing that the party had lost more than a thousand councillors, Tories in Scotland were in despair, with much of the blame being laid at the feet of the leader.
Tory MP Crispin Blunt said: “I’ve been trying to get her out openly since December. Lots of people are trying to get the message over.”
His Westminster colleague Bernard Jenkin said voters could see May was “not in control of events.”
“Certainly, among Conservative activists and council candidates, there is an almost universal feeling that it is time for her to move on.”
He added: “If the Conservative party doesn’t mend its ways pretty quickly, the Conservative party is going to be toast.”
Former cabinet minister Priti Patel told the BBC that May was “part of the problem”.
“I just don’t think we can continue like this. We need change,” she added.
Tory party chairman Brandon Lewis tried to defend the bad result. He told Sky News that the reason the party had done so poorly was because they had done too well at the elections four years ago.
“I have said for a while these are going to be tough elections for us.
“The reality is we were fighting these elections from a real high water mark for us off the back of the 2015 General Election.
“People are frustrated with where they see parliamentarians are.
“And the fact that we have found this impasse in parliament.
“It’s a stark reminder to everybody in the House of Commons that we need to get past that impasse, deliver on what people voted for, and focus on that as parliamentarians as well.”
Home Secretary Sajid Javid used his speech at the Tory party conference in Aberdeen to warn Scottish delegates that it was all about to get much worse.
“Of course we knew it would be a tough time in the cycle. We knew there was frustration about our national politics,” he said. “I heard plenty of it myself knocking on doors in Wakefield yesterday.
“And, there’s no denying the European elections in a few weeks will be even more challenging – in every part of the UK.
“We told the public we would be out of the EU by March 29. Brits don’t exactly cry out for extra elections at the best of times.”
When May addressed the Scottish conference, she didn’t even mention the poor results in Scotland.
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Instead, the Prime Minister’s speech focused mostly on independence, and Nicola Sturgeon’s renewed push for a second referendum. May said the people of Scotland “spoke clearly” in 2014, “but the SNP did not like the answer”.
The Prime Minister said she had an “old-fashioned belief” in democracy.
“Last weekend was their party conference, so of course that meant last week there was yet another ‘independence update’ from the First Minister.
“Let me just say this: I have an old-fashioned belief that in a democracy, if you put a question to the people – you should respect the answer they give you.
“That seems to be a pretty big difference between Nicola Sturgeon and me.”
May said the SNP leader saw “Brexit as an opportunity to further her party’s obsession with one thing and one thing only – independence”.
“Just imagine if Scotland had a government that put as much energy into improving Scotland’s hospitals as the SNP put into chasing independence,” the Prime Minister added.
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