Penny Mordaunt today swiftly deleted a tweet that shared a claim her rivals will “murder” the Tory party.
The leadership contender’s Twitter account posted an article from the Daily Telegraph with the headline: “Tory MPs - vote for Rishi Sunak or Liz Truss today and you’ll murder the party you love.”
Two MPs have been murdered in recent years, Labour's Jo Cox and Tory David Amess.
Written by columnist Allison Pearson, the article said Ms Truss is “so wooden she makes Starmer look like Meryl Streep and Tom Cruise combined”.
Slamming Mr Sunak it added: “ Labour would think all its Christmases had come at once if the richest man in Parliament were to be named PM during the most savage cost of living crisis in forty years”.
It’s thought the tweet was posted accidentally, and automatically pulled in the Telegraph’s article headline word-for-word.
It’s not known whether Ms Mordaunt posted the tweet to her verified account herself, or whether it was posted by a staff member. It was swiftly replaced with a fresh tweet pledging "mortgage pathways" in which tenants can have their rent payments count towards a credit record.
It comes after calls for more moderate language as the Tory leadership race descended into blue-on-blue attacks.
A source on Ms Mordaunt’s campaign said when her two rivals pulled out of a Sky debate: “It’s a shame some colleagues cannot find a way to debate one another in a civil way.”
Ms Mordaunt is locked in a neck-and-neck battle to make it onto the final ballot of 180,000 Tory members to choose the next Prime Minister.
MPs will at 4pm today whittle Ms Mordaunt, Ms Truss and Mr Sunak down to two candidates to go to hustings and a vote by September 5.
In the latest ballot Rishi Sunak won 118 MPs’ votes - two away from being guaranteed a spot in the top two.
But Liz Truss was on 86 votes, just six behind Penny Mordant on 92. And the right-winger picked up 15 votes despite her latest eliminated rival being Tom Tugendhat, a moderate.
The result today could be tight and comes amid accusations of secretive vote-lending by the campaigns.
There is also controversy after Tobias Ellwood, a Penny Mordaunt supporter, had the whip suspended by Boris Johnson for not backing the government in Monday’s confidence vote.
Speaking out today, Mr Ellwood said: “The nation has had enough of the blue on blue… we’ve lost our way a bit.” He called for leaders to leaders to show "decorum" and “dial the temperature down a bit”.
Mr Ellwood also denied he ignored a demand from whips to return from a trip to Moldova, saying runways were melting in the heat and there were security issues in the country.
He told Sky News: “I didn’t ignore it at all, I kept the Whips’ Office informed the entire time.”
