LBC host James O’Brien has taken aim at the Conservative Party over their leadership contest.
It comes amid the party’s conference in Birmingham, with Rishi Sunak’s successor due to be appointed on November 2.
Russell Findlay was last week appointed as the leader of the Scottish Conservatives, replacing the outgoing Douglas Ross.
Now, LBC host O’Brien has taken aim at the contest, saying on his show: “The idea that you can be in charge for 14 years and then mount a leadership campaign based on how awful everything is and how you’re the person to fix it seems to me to be evidence of something quite new, evidence of something quite novel.
“I don’t know if it’s … I mean listen it’s not even sort of criticising the record. It’s acknowledging the record and saying all of these people were in the wheelhouse.
“They all had positions of varying degrees of seniority. Some of them held some of the great offices of state.”
"They're still desperate despite the lovelessness of the landslide." With the Conservative conference underway, @mrjamesob ponders how the Tory leadership contenders can 'think they have a remedy to fix things', despite having been in power for 14 years. pic.twitter.com/KmVpykaYCM
— LBC (@LBC) September 30, 2024
Those still in the race to become the next Tory leader include former home secretary James Cleverly, former business secretary Kemi Badenoch, former immigration minister Robert Jenrick and former security minister Tom Tugendhat.
O’Brien continued: “All of them have had ministerial experience. So they’re all, their fingerprints are all over the catastrophe that they are now claiming is some sort of… that they have a remedy for, that they have the prescription to fix things.”
He added: “They’re still desperate despite the shallowness of the victory, the lovelessness of the landslide and that speaks to an electoral narrative that is as much about what people voted against, as much about why people didn’t want the Tories as it was about why people wanted Labour.”
O’Brien continued that this wasn’t “great news” for Labour but that it made the question of “what went wrong for the other lot even more interesting”.
