“It was always a matter of when, not if, Suella would defect. The Conservatives did all we could to look after Suella’s mental health, but she was clearly very unhappy,” the spokesperson said.
The backlash came quickly. A Reform spokesperson said: “It’s gutter politics, a sign of what the Conservative Party has become.” At a press conference in Westminster Monday night, Farage said of the Tories: “Their reaction to Suella’s defection has been pretty abusive. Don’t please ask any questions about that. We will not lower ourselves to their level.”
The backlash was not confined to Reform. Government minister Mike Tapp described the remarks as “below the standards we expect,” while Labour colleague Josh Fenton-Glynn said it was “horrible.”
“Attacking someone on mental health is wrong,” he wrote on X. “The kind of first draft of an email you do before having a cup of tea and letting your better angels take over.”
A new version of the Conservative statement, which was sent around an hour-and-a-half after the original, pointedly omitted the “mental health” comments, with Conservative officials saying the original “draft” had been sent in “error.”
It is the latest in a series of Conservative attacks on defectors to Farage’s outfit.