It was like a wake. There were tears. And Rishi Sunak said sorry eight times.
Around half the 251 Conservative MPs who lost their seat at the election were invited to the Tory party’s holy of holies, the Carlton Club.
They were there to hear the former prime minister apologise for the party’s election disaster and to grieve together for the demise of once-promising political careers.
Many of those who attended, including some defending majorities of more than 20,000, were defeated because Reform UK polled 6,000, 7,000 or 8,000 votes and handed victory to Labour.
There were commiserations and recriminations. The mood was one of gloom. And some ex-MPs present claimed the low turnout at the reception reflected anger against Mr Sunak.
“Rishi came to basically give condolences to those who’d fallen,” former Commons deputy speaker Nigel Evans, who lost in Ribble Valley to Labour by 856 votes, told Sky News.
“It was very teary at times. But Rishi said sorry for the fact that the election result wasn’t as he had planned. He must have said sorry eight times.”
After Mr Sunak’s repeated apologies, interim party chairman Richard Fuller and interim chief whip Stuart Andrew spoke to the ex-MPs about how the party needed to rebuild.
“We’ve got great expertise in the room, more expertise in this room than we’ve got at Parliament,” said Mr Evans, first elected in 1992. “We were told: ‘We need your help’.”
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‘Why did we go early?’
Asked if some defeated MPs confronted Mr Sunak about the disastrous decision to hold the election in July rather than wait until the autumn, Mr Evans said: “Well, not to his face there wasn’t.
“But in private conversations, people said: ‘Why did we go early?’ And I think that most people believe that had we gone in November, when the expectation was that’s what we were going to do, we would have probably saved 100 seats at least.
“We were never going to win. People said: ‘Why haven’t you stopped the boats? Why haven’t you sent people to Rwanda?’ And we haven’t done any of that.”
‘Rebuilding the Conservative brand’
Adam Holloway, who lost Gravesham to Labour by 2,712 votes, told Sky News: “What we’re in the business of now is rebuilding and rebuilding the conservative brand.
“And for people like us today, standing as Conservatives in the last election, trying to defend indefensible levels of low-skilled migration, trying to defend crazy net zero targets and so on, makes it very difficult to say.
“It doesn’t surprise me that we’ve had this defeat. The problem is that the good people who voted Reform UK have got precisely the opposite of what they thought they were voting for.”
On Mr Sunak’s dash to the polls on 4 July, Mr Holloway, first elected in 2005, said: “Clearly it was, in my view, disastrous. Literally, when that was announced we were scrabbling around. I remember spending £16,500 on my credit cards to buy stamps in order to get letters out.
“It’s about what’s going on out there, in the interest of the people of the country. The Tory party has not served them well because we’ve allowed Labour to take over.”
Former PM looked tense
Other defeated MPs present were James Sunderland, who lost Bracknell to Labour by 784 votes, and Shailesh Vara, who lost North West Cambridgeshire by just 39 votes to the new baby of the Commons, Labour’s Sam Carling, aged just 22.
Mr Sunak looked tense as he left the reception, flanked by his loyal North Yorkshire allies Julian Smith, MP for Skipton and Ripon, and Kevin Hollinrake, shadow business secretary and MP for Thirsk and Malton.
If he found it tough coming face-to-face with the ex-MPs who blame him for the scale of the Tory defeat, it showed.