City grandee Lord Cruddas calls for Tory leadership race to be suspended
A City grandee and Tory peer has called for the party’s leadership election to be suspended and for Boris Johnson to remain in office in the wake of cyber security concerns over online voting.
Lord Peter Cruddas, billionaire founder of CMC Markets, said that any threat of outside sabotage of the vote would mean that “the result will lack integrity, credibility and nobody will have confidence in the board and the result”.
Cruddas has been running a campaign to try and allow Conservative members to have a say on whether Johnson should remain as party leader, after he was forced to resign in the wake of more than 60 government resignations.
It was reported last night that ballots would be sent out to Tory members later than initially planned and that The National Cyber Security Centre had recommended against the plan to allow people to change their votes throughout the contest.
Conservative Campaign Headquarters was warned that the system could be susceptible to cyber attacks.
The party has decided to heed the advice and members can now only vote once either via mail or online, with voting set to begin next week.
Cruddas told The Telegraph that the party should “immediately suspend the leadership campaign” and “reject the resignation of the Prime Minister and ask him to stay on whilst the Board fixes any cyber issues”.
“The Board of the Conservative Party has a massive responsibility to ensure that any campaign is free from interference, is valid and has integrity,” he said.
“This is a big responsibility for the board, because if there is only one invalid vote due to a cyber-attack the whole vote and campaign is destroyed, the result will lack integrity, credibility and nobody will have confidence in the board and the result.”
It comes after a new YouGov poll for The Times yesterday put Liz Truss ahead of Rishi Sunak by 34 points, despite a faltering start to the week for the foreign secretary.
The Tory leadership frontrunner was forced to make a dramatic policy U-turn yesterday, after she put out a proposal to link public sector pay to regional wages.
This would have meant savings of £8.8bn and lower pay for people who work as nurses and teachers in areas outside London and the South East.
The policy sparked a fierce backlash from Conservative MPs, particularly those with marginal seats outside the South East.