A Conservative donor slammed his own party on Monday, claiming the Tory government was not fit to run the country after the last six years of chaos.
Guy Hands, chief executive of private equity firm Terra Firma and long-time supporter of the Tories, was particularly frustrated with the way economy has been handled in the years since the EU referendum.
Asked on BBC Radio 4′s Today programme if the Conservative Party “was fit to run the country” and pull in investment right now, Hands replied: “No, to be quite blunt.”
As the Conservative Party is about to get its fifth leader in six years, and de facto a new prime minister, the remaining contenders Rishi Sunak and Penny Mordaunt are expected to try and fix the economic damage done by Liz Truss and her mini-budget. Unveiled on September 23, it included £45 billion of unfunded tax cuts, spooked the markets and sent the value of the pound plummeting.
But Hands suggested the problem was much deeper than that – and the Tory Party had a lot to fix.
He said: ″I think it’s got to move on from fighting internal wars, and focus on what needs to be done in the economy and admitting some of the mistakes they’ve made in the last six years which have frankly put this country on a path to be the sick man of Europe.”
Hands also took aim at the Brexit deal, negotiated by Boris Johnson.
“The reality is when they did Brexit, they had a dream, and the dream was a low-tax, low-benefit economy.
“Truss, to be fair to her, tried it – it clearly isn’t something that’s acceptable to the British people.
“The British people have never voted, and never shown any inclination to vote for the sort of extreme Thatcherism that Brexit needed.
“Once you accept that you can’t actually do that, then the Brexit that was done is completely hopeless and will only drive Britain into a disastrous economy state.
“If the Tory party can own up to the mistakes they made and how they negotiated Brexit and have someone leading it who actually has the intellectual capability and authority to re-negotiate Brexit, there is a possibility of turning around the economy.
“Without that, the economy is frankly doomed.”
He predicted that taxes will gradually climb while social services and benefits decline, higher interest rates and the eventual bailout from the International Monetary Fund (IMF), as the UK experienced in 1976.