A recently ousted Conservative MP has quit the party, declaring it to be “dead”.
Marcus Fysh, first elected to represent Yeovil in 2015, was a minister in Liz Truss’s cabinet.
He was one of the many Tories who lost their seats in this week’s general election – and it seems he has not taken the Conservatives’ terrible performance well.
On Saturday night, he wrote on X: “I hereby resign from Conservatives.
“It’s dead. No chance of ever being electable again with its current non-Conservative Parliamentary composition.
“Move on. Let’s do something else.”
Surprisingly, the grandson of former Conservative PM Winston Churchill, and a former Tory MP himself, Nicholas Soames, then piped up.
He replied to the post, writing: “I really don’t think anyone will notice. The total idiot.”
Fysh furiously hit back: “Mate you are a total weapon.”
The ex-MP then retweeted a story from The Independent from 2019 about Soames losing the whip for voting against Boris Johnson over Brexit.
The whip was restored to Soames just weeks later – he is currently a Tory peer in the Lords.
Fysh later explained his frustration with the Conservative Party on Times Radio.
He said: “Everyone is wasting their time with it and I’m just calling it how I see it, really. If it was my business I’d wind it up.”
He continued: “The sooner it’s put out of its misery the better, and that is what I think needs to happen. I would actually dissolve the corporate entity of the party and I would start again with a new brand, a new leader and a everything.”
Fysh said: “There’s no point being involved in it. I honestly don’t think it’s viable, I just don’t think it works anymore. I don’t think there’s political space for where the current crop of MPs want to be, which is on the centre-left, SDP side of politics, the old SDP. They are centre-left politicians and that’s where Labour is.”
He also claimed the Tories’ “fatal flaw” was not making a “proper job” of Brexit, and that he would have liked David Cameron to stay on as PM.
Fysh’s seat was one of whopping 252 the Conservatives lost last week, when the public hit the polls for the first time in five years.
His majority of 16,181 was overturned by the Liberal Democrats’ Adam Dance, turning Yeovil yellow for the first time since 2010.
Labour’s landslide victory pushed Rishi Sunak to apologise for his party’s performance, and to resign.
New PM Keir Starmer has already put together his Labour cabinet and has promised to “rebuild Britain”.