His comments came after Culture Secretary Nadine Dorries, who is backing Liz Truss in the election, accused the former chancellor’s team of using “dark arts” to help Jeremy Hunt in the next round because “Team Rishi” believed that Sunak would beat Hunt. in the final repeat vote of party members. Shapps, who pulled out of the match to support Sunak, told Sky News: “It just didn’t happen in this case.” He added: “Jeremy Hunt himself has said that everyone on his nomination paper is someone who is very close to his campaign. So even he has wiped it out.” Shapps also rejected the claim by Brexit opportunities minister Jacob Rees-Mogg, also a Truss supporter, that Sunak was a “socialist chancellor”. “Clearly a guy who’s fiscally Conservative, wants to reduce the debt and the deficit, who wants to reduce the debt as a percentage of the overall economy — the idea that he’s a socialist is clearly not true,” he said. Sunak’s campaign received a further boost on Wednesday morning when Health Secretary Steve Barclay said he was backing him for the leadership. Tory MPs will have the chance to vote on Wednesday for the eight candidates vying to replace Boris Johnson as voting begins to find his successor. Sunak, Liz Truss, Tom Tugendhat, Kemi Badenoch, Penny Mordaunt, Jeremy Hunt, Nadhim Zahawi and Suella Braverman will be on the ballot after securing the 20 nominations from fellow MPs required to enter the competition. Voting is expected to take place between 1.30 and 3.30pm on Wednesday, with the result announced at around 5pm. Any candidate with less than 30 votes will drop out. Shapps was also asked about Sunak who paid tribute to Johnson when he launched his campaign on Tuesday night, calling the prime minister a “remarkable man” despite questioning his competence, honesty and seriousness in his resignation letter. Rishi Sunak pays tribute to ‘remarkable man’ Boris Johnson at campaign launch – video “I think it’s clear that you can be both brilliant as a person and also have flaws,” he said. “As I have pointed out many times over the last two years, Boris Johnson is a brilliant person who has done many remarkable things, including getting us through this Brexit nightmare that we have lived through for the last six years, and the way he has been one of the main leaders in the world, but obviously he has made mistakes.” He added. “Like all of us, you can be great and flawed. It applies to each of us. There are no exceptions to this.” Shapps denied Sunak’s praise for the prime minister because the leadership challenger realized there was still substantial grassroots support for Johnson. “I just don’t agree with that,” he said. “Rishi, myself and the others worked very, very closely with the prime minister, even to the end, to try to turn things around to try to save the situation. “This does not detract from the fact that Boris Johnson was remarkable in many ways and it is a great sadness for many voters, including myself as a member of his cabinet, that he could not go.” He added: “Personally, I thought that despite some issues, doubts, some shortcomings, I actually thought that the advantages of it outweighed it.” On the airport strikes, Shapps said Sunak had a 22-point plan, including changing the law to speed up the processing of security clearances. “We would also use some Brexit freedoms and ask airports to be realistic about the programs they run, all to ensure that when schools break up for the summer, across the country – and they already have in places and Scotland, for example – to get some of the airports running as smoothly as possible,” he said. Subscribe to First Edition, our free daily newsletter – every morning at 7am. BST Shapps also said he did not think the time was right for the railways to strike. “I don’t think that’s justified, and one of the things I’ve talked about in the past is that we have to modernize our railways because we can’t have a situation where we can’t run services on weekends because they’re not allowed to put in the contract that sometimes you work a weekend,” he said.
