Senior cabinet ministers privately do not support Theresa May’s desire to keep the Conservative target of reducing net immigration to the tens of thousands, according to an editorial in the London Evening Standard newspaper run by the former chancellor George Osborne.
In a leader column, the newspaper said there had been an assumption at the top of the Conservative party that May would use the election to “bury the pledge” made by David Cameron before he was elected in 2010 because it was unachievable and undesirable.
“That’s what her cabinet assumed; none of its senior members supports the pledge in private and all would be glad to see the back of something that has caused the Conservative party such public grief,” the newspaper said.
The column added that it was a mystery why May had restated her commitment to the “economically illiterate” policy and suggested the prime minister should use the manifesto to “sweep away this bad policy from the past”.
It said May “knows better than almost anyone” that net migration is “not in the gift of government” but is instead subject to the “vagaries of the world economy”.
Editorials are written anonymously as the voice of the newspaper, but Osborne tweeted a link to the column and the front page of the Evening Standard, which attributes a squeeze in the cost of living to inflation caused by Brexit.
Here's our editorial on why the Tory pledge to reduce migration to 10,000s should be dropped from the Manifesto ... https://t.co/68jRp1LxeD
— George Osborne (@George_Osborne) May 17, 2017
When Osborne was appointed, the advisory committee on business appointments (Acoba) stated that in his role as editor of the Evening Standard he should “not draw on (disclose or use for the benefit of himself or the organisation to which this advice refers) any privileged information available to him from his time in ministerial office”.
May sacked him from the cabinet when she took over from Cameron as prime minister after the EU referendum vote in favour of Brexit.
He quit as MP for Tatton after the general election was called. May has said she supports bringing down immigration to “sustainable levels”, which she views as the tens rather than hundreds of thousands – a target she failed to meet for six years as home secretary.
She is expected to repeat the pledge in the Conservative manifesto.
