London: Suella Braverman, the sacked British Indian Conservative Party leader, on Friday apologised to the public for the Conservative Party’s performance over the last 14 years after winning a seat in the 2024 General Election.
Official results showed the Labour Party has won enough seats to have a majority in the UK Parliament and will form the next government. The Labour Party is estimated to have a majority of around 160 seats in the House of Commons.
Rishi Sunak, the country’s first British Indian-origin prime minister comfortably held on to his own Richmond and Northallerton seat in northern England with 23,059 votes but failed to turn things around for his party at a national level after 14 years in government.
Saying ‘Sorry’ for her Conservative Party’s performance over the last 14 years, UK-born Braverman, who is of Indian heritage with a Goan-origin father and Tamil-origin mother after winning the newly-created Fareham and Waterlooville constituency said: “I want to briefly address the results around the country, and there’s only one thing I can say… sorry. I’m sorry,”
“The Great British people voted for us over 14 years and we did not keep our promises… we acted like we were entitled to your votes,” BBC quoted the 44-year-old barrister as saying. “I’m sorry my party didn’t listen to you,” she said.
“We’ve acted as if we’re entitled to your vote regardless of what we did, regardless of what we didn’t do, despite promising time after time that we would do those things and we need to learn our lesson because if we don’t, bad as tonight has been for my party, we’ll have many worse nights to come.”
“The country deserves better and we’ve got to do better and I will do everything in my power to rebuild trust. We need to listen to you – you have spoken to us very clearly.”
The former home secretary had been fighting to be re-elected in the new constituency in Hampshire following changes to parliamentary boundaries.
Braverman has represented the people of Fareham since 2015, being re-elected in 2017 and 2019, on both occasions increasing the share of the vote for the Conservatives.
Braverman was sacked in late 2023 by Sunak after she defied No 10 over an article accusing the Metropolitan Police of bias in the policing of pro-Palestine protests.
Braverman claimed Prime Minister Sunak sacked her for speaking out against the “appeasement of Islamists”, but that she would do it again because she feared the country was sleep-walking into a “ghettoised society where free expression and British values are diluted”.
