The Telegraph has got hold of a zinger of a private memo currently doing the rounds on Tory MPs’ WhatsApp groups. The 421-word dossier, which sums up all of the ex-chancellor’s supposed errors during his two-year tenure, has been published by the paper’s associate editor Camilla Tominey.

The document lays into Sunak, accusing the favourite to replace Boris Johnson of reckless overspending and a commitment to ‘big state’ economic policy. It also claims that he lied about his wife’s non-dom tax status and that he committed ‘schoolboy errors’ that led to widespread fraud of the Covid loan scheme.

Frontrunner position has traditionally been a dangerous place during Tory leadership elections. MPs and party members often vote to rule out candidates they dislike as much as backing specific leadership hopefuls. Meanwhile, Boris Johnson is reportedly keen to see his former right-hand man, whose resignation precipitated his own fall from No. 10, cut down to size. There have been suggestions that Defence Secretary Ben Wallace, who was one of the most popular potential successors until he ruled out a tilt at the top job yesterday, is also less than friendly with Sunak. You can read the full memo below:

Rishi Sunak is the Chancellor of the Exchequer who:

• Enabled Boris Johnson’s reckless over-spending and increased UK taxes to the highest level since Clement Attlee.
• Proudly announced on Twitter his commitment to ‘big state’ spending of £150 billion in ‘The largest increase in department spending this century’.
• Broke a solemn Conservative Party manifesto promise NOT to raise taxes by increasing NIC.
• Raised Corporation Tax by 30 per cent.
• Failed to deliver on the Brexit dividend to abolish 5 per cent VAT on fuel.
• Added £400 billion to the national debt to pay workers not to work, only to spend countless more billions for them to eat out a few weeks later.
• Stated that as a Conservative he would not borrow money to pay £12 billion for social care, only to magic up £18 billion for ‘cost of living’ measures just a few months later.
• Wasted £32 billion on Track & Trace tech that never delivered.
• Wrote off £4.9 billion in Covid loan fraud as a result – in the words of Lord Agnew, his own minister – of ‘arrogance, indolence, ignorance’ and ‘schoolboy errors’.
• Delivered a failed March 2022 budget that was a welter of contradictions, tax raises and sleights of hand that defied analysis, logic or comprehension.
• Imposed an investment-destroying windfall tax on energy companies.
• Refuses to support calls for tax cuts on the private sector as, he now states, ‘fairy tales’ on the grounds that they would drive inflation yet has caved in to huge pay rises to the public sector.

Getting ‘Ready for Rishi’ means supporting a candidate who:

• Like Boris, landed a partygate fine from the police for breaking lockdown rules.
• Publicly lied not once but twice when seeking to explain his wife’s ‘non-dom’ tax status.
• Secretly held a ‘Green Card’ to work in the US eighteen months into his Chancellorship of the UK.
• Maintains today that his resignation within minutes of Sajid Javid was an unplanned coincidence.
• Launched his campaign for the leadership of the Conservative Party with a website domain registered in December 2021.
• Lingers in negative territory in the polls with no realistic prospect of regaining the trust of 4 out of 10 Conservative voters who are repelled by the Johnson administration.

Let us keep this a Conservative party with a small ‘c’. There is nothing Conservative about the ‘big tax and big spend’ agenda of Rishi Sunak. It’s not even One Nation. It’s time for the party decisively to move on.