WATCH: George Osborne says Theresa May is a ‘dead woman walking’
3 min read
George Osborne has said Theresa May is a “dead woman talking” who will be forced to quit as Prime Minister sooner rather than later.
In a brutal assault, the former Chancellor said it was now only a question of how long she “remained on death row”.
Mr Osborne said the Prime Minster had been “in hiding” in recent days, before saying the blame for the Tory party’s failure to win a majority lay squarely with Mrs May.
And he also took a vicious swipe at Boris Johnson amid claims that the Foreign Secretary is weighing up a bid for Mrs May's job, saying "he’s in a permanent leadership campaign",
“Theresa May is a dead woman walking, it’s just how long she’s going to remain on death row,” Mr Osborne told the Andrew Marr Show.
“I think we will know very shortly – in other words we could easily get to the middle of next week and it all collapses for her or if it doesn’t, and I agree that a lot of Tory MPs don’t want a leadership campaign now, it will be delayed.
“But be in no doubt, you’ve got the leader of the opposition coming on the programme as a sort of victor and you’ve got the Prime Minister who’s supposed to have won the election in hiding"
Watch Mr Osborne's full comments below:
Mr Osborne, who is now editor of the Evening Standard editor, said it was Mrs May who was solely responsible for the defeat, hitting out at Tory insiders for trying to shift the blame on to campaign strategists.
He said: “You see a lot of the May-ites blaming Lynton Crosby. I worked with Lynton Crosby during the 2015 election, a very successful campaign, with Lynton Crosby and Mark Textor they are professionals
“The idea that they are responsible for Mrs May’s failure to communicate or the disaster of the manifesto strikes me as trying to blame other people for your own mistakes.
“In the end the only person who decides to have a General Election is the Prime Minster. The only person who decides what’s in the manifesto, is the Prime Minister”.
Mr Osborne also attacked the Prime Minister for failing to address the impact on those Tory MPs who had lost their seats.
“The Tory party is absolutely furious that there had been no acknowledgement of the suffering and the loss that had been caused,” he said.
Her also dismissed the idea that Boris Johnson was on the verge of seeking to topple Mrs May, adding that he had been in a “permanent leadership campaign.
“I’ve been reading stories about Boris Johnson being in a leadership campaign for years, in fact he’s in a permanent leadership campaign, so I’m not sure it qualifies as news.
Mr Osborne went on to praise Scottish Tory leader Ruth Davidson as a “heroine”, adding that had the party not drastically boosted their haul of seats to 13 from one in Scotland, “Jeremy Corbyn would have been in Downing Street”.
He said the potential arrangement that would see the Conservatives propped up by the DUP as “very unstable”.
Mr Osborne went on to attack the Prime Minister for failing to stick to the centre ground and when asked what Mrs May said to him when she sacked him last year, he said: “She said I needed to get to know my party better.”
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