FORMER Tory chairman Sir Brandon Lewis has said he believes the Conservatives lost the trust of the British public and their members when they removed Boris Johnson as leader.

Asked why the Conservatives lost support, he told GB News: “I think there is a mixture of things. If you look back from 2016 onwards, the government was focused on Brexit, then on Covid, on Ukraine, so there’s a lot of different things.

“But I do think if you’re looking for that one moment where the polls changed dramatically and never came back, it’s when a group of MPs decided to override the mandate that Boris Johnson was given by the public, not just our members overwhelmingly, but the British public.

“And then a few weeks later, we did it again when our members chose Liz Truss.

“But particularly, when the British public gives someone a mandate and a small group of people effectively say, ‘we’ve got a better idea’, I think that’s a problem.

“I think we saw that with Margaret Thatcher, and we’re suffering now from what we’ve done with Boris Johnson.

“There’s a whole group of us, MPs, who have served in these governments, who have been part of the government.

“But I think if you’re looking back with hindsight, if 14 million people gave somebody a mandate to do a job, and then, as MPs, we said, ‘no, we’ve changed our minds, we don’t agree with you, we’re doing something different’, that’s a difficult place to recover from.”