Theresa May's warning to the Conservatives ahead of party conference

The Tory Party has “failed to see the threat from the Liberal Democrats” while focusing too much on Reform, Theresa May has warned.

Writing in The Times ahead of the party’s annual conference in Birmingham, Baroness May said the remaining candidates for the Conservative leadership could “play into Reform’s hands” by failing to understand why they lost the general election.

The former prime minister said the Conservatives lost power in July not due to policy, but because the party had “trashed our brand”, losing its reputation for “integrity and competence”.

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Blaming the Partygate scandal and Liz Truss’s mini-budget, Lady May added the Tories had spent “too long tacking to the right in order to appease potential Reform voters” and “forgot that we are not a right-wing party but a centre-right party”.

Lady May compared the Conservatives’ strategy to last month’s 1,500m Olympic final in Paris, in which Norway’s Jakob Ingebrigtsen was too focused on defeating Britain’s Josh Kerr that he allowed American Cole Hocker to come through on the inside and take gold.

She said: “Just as Ingebrigtsen was focused on Kerr and failed to see that his action against him would open up other threats, so the Conservative Party has been focused on Reform and failed to see the threat from the Liberal Democrats – losing 60 seats to them at the election.”

Her intervention comes ahead of a Conservative conference that will see former ministers Robert Jenrick, Kemi Badenoch, James Cleverly and Tom Tugendhat continue their battle for the party leadership.

The four candidates will each have an opportunity to address the conference, and their campaigns will be lobbying MPs before