Housing minister mocked over bid to become Prime Minister

Housing minister Kit Malthouse appears to have some difficulty being taken seriously as a candidate for Conservative party leader and Prime Minister.

Malthouse - a Brexiteer who has held two ministerial positions since being elected to Parliament four years ago - describes his relative inexperience is an advantage.

“There is a yearning for change out there. I believe I’m the new face, with fresh new ideas, from a new and talented generation. This leadership campaign cannot be about the same old faces, scarred by wars that have split the Tory Party over the last three years” he says.

However, he has come in for criticism for considering himself qualified to stand for the positions.

Conservative minister Sir Alan Duncan says that it is “embarrassing” and “a bit silly” that there are so many candidates standing. He says Boris Johnson, Jeremy Hunt and Michael Gove are in the “top league” with Sajid Javid, Dominic Raab and possibly Andrea Leadsom in the next layer, with "young thrusters" Matt Hancock and Rory Stewart.

But of the rest - including Malthouse - he says: "Everybody else should just admit to themselves that this is perhaps a cry for attention or a cry for 'excuse me can I be a minister when this is all over?' I think they ought to have a bit more self-realisation and stop now."

Meanwhile Sky News political correspondent Lewis Goodall has blogged that Malthouse is suffering from ISP - Island Parliament Syndrome. That is, Goodall says Malthouse is confusing the limited powers of the British parliament with the need to reach an accommodation with the other EU governments over Brexit. 

Lewis writes of Malthouse: “…parroting his achievement of brokering a compromise which almost no-one supported: critically, most of all the EU, who are the side who would have to compromise to accept it.”

Yesterday the Secretary of State for Housing Communities and Local Government - James Brokenshire, who is Malthouse’s boss at the department - urged candidates who would clearly “fall at the first hurdle” of the leadership election to stand down. Malthouse was not named specifically.