Tory Party leadership hopeful Mel Stride has said it is “completely untenable” that the average Conservative voter is 63 years old.
According to a YouGov poll, the only age groups in which the Conservatives outperformed Labour in the General Election were in the 60-69, and 70 plus age groups.
Mr Stride is one of six candidates in the running to become the new leader of the Conservatives after former Prime Minister Rishi Sunak resigned in the wake of the party’s worst election result in its history.
Asked how he felt about a poll showing that three in five people in the UK do not care who the next Conservative leader is, Mr Stride told Times Radio: “The way I feel is, in a sense, not a huge amount of surprise.
“Because I think we have been a party that has been fighting itself and being introspective in a way that most people from the outside would have found pretty selfish.
“We did some great things when we were in government, absolutely great things, but there are areas where we failed to deliver.”
He added: “We’ve got to get a hearing with the British electorate, and we’re going to do that through unity, and we’re going to do that through a lot of listening and a lot of hard work and working out the answer to a lot of fundamental and difficult questions, including, for example, the fact that the average Conservative voter is aged 63, that is completely untenable.
“It is not something that you can solve by leaping on some magical ideological square. It is something you solve through deep, hard work over a sustained period of time.”
Mr Stride will compete against colleagues: James Cleverly, Kemi Badenoch, Robert Jenrick, Tom Tugendhat and Priti Patel, all of whom are former government ministers, to become leader of the opposition.
The former work and pensions secretary criticised the Government’s approach to tackling those out of the labour market and not looking for work due to mental health issues, saying the new Government is “eerily silent” on the topic.
He said: “There is an issue, particularly actually around mental health, and particularly around younger people.
“Now that’s why, when I was the secretary of state and in government, I brought in fundamental reforms around something called the work capability assessment, which is the gateway into these benefits, to put the emphasis on helping people, particularly into employment, rather than consigning them to going on to benefits for the very long term.
“And what the OBR (Office for Budget Responsibility) said was that would reduce the numbers going on to those benefits by over 400,000 people. So there are things you can do, but it takes a bit of time, and it takes a lot of political will.
“My concern is that this Government said absolutely nothing about the reforms that I brought through, and if they do absolutely nothing, then the costs, for example, to the taxpayer, can continue to spiral ever upwards.
“Now, in the context of the kind of public finance pressures that we all know that we have, and this talk about tax rises and what’s coming up in the budget, it would be a complete dereliction of duty for this government to simply ignore these things, and at the moment, they are eerily silent on them.”
Elsewhere, Mr Stride said X owner Elon Musk’s commentary on UK politics has been “absurd and deeply, deeply unhelpful”.
The owner of the social media site formerly known as Twitter has been criticising the Government’s response to riots, that has involved convictions for those found guilty of inciting violence online.
Mr Stride said Musk’s comments that the UK is on the brink of a civil war are “absurd and deeply, deeply unhelpful”.
He said: “I have concerns about X (formerly Twitter) generally, in terms of the fairly permissive approach to those that are able to further all sorts of views, including conspiracy theories, etc, on that platform.
“And I do think that one of the take aways from the very, very unfortunate incidents that have happened in recent days and weeks is that we do need to look afresh at social media in terms of policing content, in terms of consequence for those platform providers that allow some of these ideas to percolate, because they do have real world consequences, as we saw on our streets.”
Asked if he would stop using X, Mr Stride said: “Me, personally no, certainly not at the moment.
“I know some fellow colleagues across the House actually have been debating that, and I think some of them might have actually done that.
“In my case, I will stay on the site, but I do think we do need to have a long and careful, measured look at the way in which sites like X are feeding into issues like conspiracy theories, misinformation and violence on our streets.”