Tories should not have toppled Boris Johnson, admits Zahawi

Nadhim Zahawi said he wanted the Tories to «hold our nerves»; Photo: Victoria Jones/PA

Nadhim Zahawi, the former chancellor, said the Conservatives were wrong to oust Boris Johnson and called him «the most influential leader since Thatcher».

In his first newspaper interview After leaving office, Mr Zahawi said he told Mr Johnson that if he was not prepared to leave on his own terms, “they are going to drag your corpse out of this place.”

They met on the evening of July 6, 2022, after a number of ministers decided to resign in protest at the then Prime Minister's handling of the Chris Pincher scandal.

The next day, Mr Johnson said that he was standing and said in his speech: “When the herd moves, it moves.”

In an interview with the Sunday Times, Mr Zahawi said: “I would like us to keep our composure. Many colleagues were scared. If our colleagues had stepped back and simply realized that Twitter was the wrong country, we would probably have made a very different decision.”

He wrote a memoir, The Boy from Baghdad: My Journey from Waziria to Westminster, which focuses on his childhood in Iraq . At the age of 11, he fled to Britain with his family to escape Saddam Hussein's regime. The book is due to be published in August.

Mr Zahawi said: “[What] I was trying to say… there are no supermen in politics. We are all fallible.”

The Stratford-upon-Avon MP has decided to resign after 14 years in Westminster and said: “My heart said carry on, this is one of the best seats in Parliament.

“The boss said you got into 11 Downing Street, which is a pretty good achievement. It's time to let someone younger, more energetic, capable of fighting the really tough elections… and of course I think I have at least a couple more decades before I'm put out on the grass to do interesting things He became the 64th Conservative MP to resign ahead of the general election, but denied his decision was linked to Rishi Sunak and said it had been a «difficult and challenging » the path to a conservative. victory.

He said he wanted Mr Sunak to go to the polls and make a number of promises, including scrapping inheritance tax, which he said had «the wrong outcomes and incentives» and that some entrepreneurs had to make the decision to “sell their business too early.”