Tobias Ellwood has urged moderate Conservatives not to leave the party as he suggested Liz Truss has until Christmas to turn her troubled premiership around.
The senior MP, who chairs parliament’s defence select committee but was stripped of the Tory whip in July, said the party should stick to its sensible and fiscally responsible roots.
He said that “haemorrhaging the one nation voice” would lead to electoral disaster and called on the under-fire prime minister to “regroup very, very quickly” by bringing in the “full complement of talent”.
As Truss prepares to give the closing speech at a Conservative party conference that has been plagued by divisions and several U-turns, she was urged by Ellwood to show humility and acknowledge that “some serious mistakes were made”.
“She needs to be more inclusive, more open and transparent in where she wants to take Britain – reconfirming fiscal responsibility as the hallmark of where our party sits,” he said.
Although having not held the Tory whip for three months, due to not supporting Boris Johnson in a no-confidence vote because he was in Moldova, Ellwood said he absolutely still felt at home in the Conservative party. “If people like myself and those who are like-minded think about departing the party, where does that leave the party?” he said.
“It’s the amalgamation of all the voices in the party that usually provides that moderate centre-right, sensible, fiscally responsible leadership that the nation then supports and elects.
“As soon as you start haemorrhaging the one nation voice of the party, we will not have that mass appeal. We will not be able to win elections because we will fail to secure support from the centre ground.”
Ellwood said talk of immediately toppling Truss was premature, and she still had a chance to salvage her premiership by ensuring the chancellor’s medium-term growth plan, pencilled in for 23 November, and Office for Budget Responsibility forecasts were brought forward.
“It isn’t just the markets, it’s the country and indeed the party that want stability, want to see leadership and confidence and see a party united,” he said.
“Let’s not allow more weeks of discussion and debate and questioning as to where policies may go. Let’s see the details but ensure prior to those details being announced that there is a healthy scrutiny behind the scenes, and that’s what I think is missing at the moment.”
Ellwood said that “for the party to survive and thrive in the future, we need to repair this”, adding: “If we’re at Christmas and we’re looking at the same situation, then yes people will be raising some very awkward questions about where do we go from here.”
Given the whispering among some MPs about submitting no-confidence letters in Truss, Ellwood said any future leadership candidate “should be selected by MPs alone”, which would mean stripping about 175,000 Conservative members of their right to pick from a final two narrowed down by the parliamentary party.
Ellwood said that would ensure candidates have “a greater mandate when any one of those secure the leadership, so we avoid the surprises that we’re seeing now unfold”.
As part of Kwasi Kwarteng’s next fiscal statement, Ellwood argued it should make significant reference to foreign policy. He said that, given half of Britain’s GDP is affected by international headwinds, “you cannot have a budget in silo and you cannot treat Britain’s economy in isolation”.
Reacting to the Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov’s call for Vladimir Putin to use low-yield nuclear weapons in Ukraine, Ellwood, who was in the army for six years, said the UK had been “fuzzy or vague” about what the response would look like.
“It’s a lose-lose situation because it means that, because we’ve been seen as risk-averse, timid and spooked by rhetoric, Putin could very well test us, believing that we won’t react proportionately,” Ellwood said.
It “absolutely makes sense” for a “robust statement” from Britain and its western allies to be made, he added, explaining “what reaction using domestic and conventional capabilities” would be provoked by Russia daring to use a nuclear weapon. “Otherwise you cross a threshold from which the world will be difficult to recover.”
Ellwood said he would suggest a “coalition of the willing” – including the US – should be formed to warn the use of a nuclear weapon would lead to “a long-range precision missile campaign, including air capabilities that takes out every single Russian military asset on Ukraine mainland and indeed in Crimea”.
He added: “It could be that there would be advice to do otherwise,” but the UK had to “think about this huge challenge this side of a weapons system being moved, not on the flip side, not once one has been used, because then it’s too late”.
• This article was amended on 6 October 2022. Tobias Ellwood missed the confidence vote on Boris Johnson’s leadership because he was in Moldova, not Ukraine as an earlier version said.
