Senior Conservatives have demanded that the party remove the whip from anonymous MPs who briefed violent rhetoric to Sunday papers, including one who quipped that Theresa May should “bring her own noose” to her next backbenchers’ meeting.
The comments drew condemnation from across the political spectrum, including Jeremy Corbyn, Keir Starmer and Jacob Rees-Mogg. During a statement by the prime minister in the Commons, May called for more care to be taken with the language used, even during heated debate.
“It is incumbent on all of us in public life to be careful about the language we use,” she said on Monday. “There are passionate beliefs on this subject … but whatever the subject, we should all be careful about our language.”
Steve Baker, the former Brexit minister who has become one of the prime minister’s fiercest public critics, called for Tory whips to seek out who had made the anonymous remarks.
He said colleagues using language about nooses and knives have “throughly disgraced” themselves. “I very much hope they are discovered and I hope she will withdraw the whip from them,” he said.
The Sunday Times quoted one unnamed Tory MP as saying: “The moment is coming when the knife gets heated, stuck in her front and twisted. She’ll be dead soon.”
Another said May was now entering “the killing zone”, and a third remarked: “Assassination is in the air.” In the Mail on Sunday, a source was quoted as saying that May should “bring her own noose” to a meeting of backbench Tories.
The former Conservative leader Iain Duncan Smith said that whoever briefed in violent terms about May’s future “needs to have the fullest weight of the Conservative…
