Senior Conservatives have launched an unprecedented attack on the former Party Chairman Sayeeda Warsi, whom they accuse of having conducted a “right-wing purge” when she was in office. Baroness Warsi outraged moderate Conservatives by calling David Cameron a “posh boy”, whereas the Thatcherites are still reeling from her purge of Parliamentary Candidates.
A senior party source told Breitbart London a number of groups have “coalesced to expose her record and oppose her re-emergence in the party”. These include officials at Conservative HQ, ordinary party members, and groups like Conservative Way Forward, which Margaret Thatcher was President of until her death.
The starting gun for the attack was sounded when the current chairman, Grant Shapps MP, used his twitter account to denounce her comments on the murder of a British citizen in Israel by Hamas. The party source described this as “the green light to party loyalists to vent their true feelings”.
Just weeks later the Young Britons’ Foundation (YBF) conference took place at Cambridge University. The right-wing training institute was dubbed by the Guardian as a Tory Madrassa, amongst party members it is seen as the spiritual home for the Thatcherite right.
At the conference she was awarded the “White Feather Award for Political Cowardice”. She received an unprecedented two nominations for: “resigning so that she could have more time to oppose the democratic state of Israel in their fight against the terrorist organisation, Hamas”, and “for drawing an equivalence between the peaceful policing of protesters and the terrorist murder of an innocent British citizen while worshipping”.
Delegates watched as pro-Israeli Robert Halfon MP, Parliamentary Private Secretary to the Chancellor George Osborne, accepted the award on her behalf. Although Halfon’s speech was subject to Chatham House reporting restrictions, one onlooker described him as having “pulled no punches” in his “distaste for her actions”.
The speech was also seen as evidence that activists’ fury was shared by the Chancellors’ team – a political group that are growing in power within the party. Shapps himself was on stage barely moments later giving what observers described as a “barnstorming hand of friendship to the Right”.
Within days, Tory youth chairman, Alexandra Paterson, had publicly apologised to the Israeli Deputy Ambassador for Warsi’s support for Palestine. Her apology was delivered in the Conservative Campaign Headquarters in front of the Rebecca Harris, the Vice Chairman of the Party. One seasoned observer said, “I cannot recall a former Party Chairman being so openly denounced in her own former office.”
Meanwhile the grassroots right have continued to add fuel to the flames. Earlier today the boss of Conservative Way Forward (CWF), Donal Blaney posted on Twitter: “How long until that principled intellectual powerhouse and political Titan Sayeeda Warsi goes the whole hog & joins Labour? Weeks or months?”.
Other grassroots activists drew attention to her purging the candidate’s list of right wing candidates with exceptional campaigning records in what one former candidate described as “a factional war against the right”.
One leading Party figure said, “It takes a special level of uselessness and unpleasantness to fall out with the Prime Minister, the Party Chairman, the Chancellor’s key advisers and ordinary activists. She deserves what she has coming to her. This is just the start.”
Warsi was appointed to the House of Lords in 2007 on the recommendation of David Cameron. At the time she was the youngest member and acquired the nickname “Baroness Token”.