A Conservative MP has said the party must not ‘ape Reform’ if it wants to regain the supporters it lost in the general election.
But Danny Kruger said the party needed to move towards the right and in particular, be ‘more robust’ on migration.
Speaking to GB News, Danny Kruger said: “Our problem is actually with the Conservative Party. We lost voters to Nigel [Farage’s] party, and our great mission must be to understand why it was that that happened.
“Jacob[Rees Mogg] and I have probably a shared analysis of that. We've been arguing for the last two years that our party should have been much more robust on migration.
“We failed on a whole range of issues that the public care a lot about, that we promised to fix, the NHS being the obvious one. That's why we lost.
“They went to Reform because Nigel presented a very compelling analysis of the problems of the country. He's essentially right in what he was saying.
“Our mission as a party must be to win those voters back.
“Congratulations to [Farage] for winning his seat but the issue is not him or his colleagues in Parliament.
“ It's with those voters who have deserted us and our challenge is to see whether we can win them back.
“He’s saying he doesn't want to join the Conservative Party, and he's just stood against us at an election, so I don't think there's any question of him joining us, or us joining him.
“The fact is, we are two different parties, but some of us in the Conservative Party share the same analysis as he and those voters who left us, which is that the British government failed the British people in the last parliament.
“We just did lots of good things, I don’t want to dismiss that. But fundamentally we didn't deliver for the people.
“Our mission is to win those people back. And yes, there is a challenge around this very impressive, charismatic character in Nigel, but I don't agree that we will solve our problems simply by admitting him.
“We also have to consider those many people who did vote for us, we need to keep them. The Conservative Party is at its best when it combines with that respectable, traditional, centrist conservative tendency, that centre right tendency, with the people themselves in those kinds of places that we've just lost.
“That's what the Conservative Party, at its best, can do. It won't do that if we just swing straight to aping Reform. We have to bring those voters back to where we are, and that means ourselves moving in a direction towards them.”
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