An ally of Rishi Sunak has said the prime minister will “absolutely” continue to lead the Conservative election campaign after his D-day ceremony blunder, which triggered fury within the party.
The prime minister was campaigning in Yorkshire on Sunday without media appearances, after cutting short his attendance at the 80th anniversary of D-day in France with other world leaders.
Mel Stride, the work and pensions secretary, said Sunak would not resign over the move in the middle of an election campaign. “There should be no question of anything other than [Sunak continuing to lead the party],” he told Sky News.
Stride said Sunak “deeply regrets” his decision to leave the D-day events early, calling the prime minister “deeply patriotic” and committed to supporting veterans. “He has recognised that he made a mistake. He deeply regrets that. He has apologised unequivocally for that,” Stride said.
“And I think he will be feeling this personally, very deeply, because he’s a deeply patriotic person. He will be deeply uncomfortable with what has happened.”
Sunak has been criticised by politicians across the spectrum for his decision. The choice to return to the UK early to resume campaigning left Keir Starmer, the Labour leader, and Nigel Farage, the Reform UK leader, to occupy his space on the world stage in France.
As Sunak failed to appear in the media on Saturday or Sunday, Labour sources said the prime minister needed to “come out of hiding soon and explain how families can afford five more years of this madness”.
The Conservatives will attempt to draw a line under the D-day debacle this week, which is expected to see manifesto launches from all of the parties.
The Tory party will announce a new policy on Sunday of recruiting 8,000 new police officers, claiming Labour would only hire another 3,000 full-time officers. It said the plan will be paid for in part by removing the student discount to the immigration health surcharge and increasing all visa fees by 25%.
However, the party’s policies so far have not been cutting through with the public, and Sunak has drifted further in the polls to about 20 points behind Labour since the election was announced.
Although Sunak was absent from the airwaves on Sunday, Richard Holden, the party chair, appeared on Sky, where he was pressed on why he was parachuted into a safe seat in Essex rather than standing in the north-east, where his current seat is being abolished.
In an uncomfortable interview, Holden claimed he had already answered the questions last week on Channel 4, and an adviser stepped in off camera to stop the line of questioning.
Tory insiders have begun to form groups discussing how to campaign in local areas without the help of Conservative central office, including trying to persuade people to vote for their local candidate to deprive Keir Starmer of an overwhelming majority.
Some Conservatives are also strategising how to prevent Nigel Farage gaining rightwing Tory MPs as defectors if he enters parliament as a Reform leader. Some within the party are pushing for the return of Boris Johnson and others are mobilising around Penny Mordaunt, while Tim Montgomerie, the founder of the ConservativeHome website, on Sunday told Times Radio there would need to be a “reconciliation” among the right.
However, Farage has been criticised for claiming Sunak’s early exit demonstrated the prime minister did not understand “our culture”. Asked if he was trying to highlight Sunak’s British-Asian background, Farage pointed to the contribution made by Commonwealth troops and suggested he was talking about the prime minister’s “class” and “privilege”.
The Reform UK leader told BBC One’s Sunday With Laura Kuenssberg programme: “I know what your question is leading at – 40% of our contribution in world war one and world war two came from the Commonwealth.
“He is utterly disconnected by class, by privilege, from how the ordinary folk in this country feel. He revealed that, I think spectacularly, when he left Normandy early.”
However, Stride said Farage’s remarks were “uncomfortable”, while Shabana Mahmood, the shadow justice secretary, said the suggestion that the prime minister was not part of “our” culture was “dog-whistle” code.
“I think this is a classic Nigel Farage trick: lean just enough to signal a bit of a dog-whistle and then lean straight back and sound perfectly reasonable and say something good about the contribution that Commonwealth soldiers, ethnic minorities, made towards the war effort,” she said.
“We can all see exactly what Nigel Farage is doing. He’s got form; it is completely unacceptable. This is a man that has a track record of seeking to divide communities, who just wants to do it with a veneer of respectability whilst he’s at it.”
