Former Prime Minister Boris Johnson has warned the Conservatives are “drifting to defeat” under Rishi Sunak.
In a blistering attack he said Mr Sunak was offering voters “nothing to rally behind” and needed to offer a “positive agenda for change”.
Mr Johnson made the comments in a series of interviews with staunch ally and former cabinet minister Nadine Dorries for her new book.
Both have been strong critics of Mr Sunak since Mr Johnson left No 10.
Mr Johnson quit as an MP when he was facing the prospect of a by-election, after being found to have misled Parliament over parties at Downing Street during lockdown.
Ms Dorries interviewed the former PM for her book, The Plot: The Political Assassination of Boris Johnson, which was published on Thursday.
The former PM told her the current government was losing voters in so-called Red Wall seats which had voted for Brexit, where he said people were going back to supporting Labour.
“You’ve got to have a positive agenda for change in the country,” he said.
“You know, people still feel hacked off. They voted for change in 2019 and they are drifting back to Labour in those Brexit seats because they’re not seeing a changed government.
“Nothing to rally behind, nothing; we are just drifting to defeat.”
Mr Johnson criticised Mr Sunak’s decision to raise corporation tax from 19p to 25p, a move first announced in 2021 when he was Mr Johnson’s chancellor.
He suggested cutting the rate to 10p, asking: “Why the hell are we putting up corporation tax in this way?”
“It’s absolutely mad,” he added.
“I really, really think that unless we grip it, the results of the local elections will be repeated at a general election, and [Labour leader Sir Keir] Starmer will be a complete disaster.”
Mr Johnson also claimed Mr Sunak was a “stooge” put in place by his own former senior adviser Dominic Cummings.
Mr Cummings was sacked by Mr Johnson in late 2020 after a bitter falling-out between the pair.
“I heard that Cummings has said he started to plot to get rid of me in January 2020,” Mr Johnson said.
“The plot was always to get Rishi in. I just couldn’t see it at the time. It’s like this Manchurian candidate, their stooge,” he said.
‘Kick in the pants’
Ms Dorries called Mr Johnson’s comments “absolutely right,” adding that he had made them in the wake of May’s local election, where the Conservatives lost control of more than 40 councils.
In a BBC Breakfast interview about her book, she said the government needed a “kick in the pants,” adding: “You’ve got to give people something to vote for.”
Asked about her motivation for writing it, she said she wanted to inform people about a “complete deficit in democracy” within the Conservative Party.
She said decisions within the party since the time of former leader Iain Duncan Smith had been dominated by a “quite small group of men” who could make or break the careers of MPs and ministers.
This group, she claimed, has been working to install Business Secretary Kemi Badenoch as the next Tory leader, calling her “the person they’ve been preparing for years”.
