Why did it take Baroness Warsi so long to quit the Tory party?

There will be little surprise that Baroness Warsi has resigned the Conservative whip; the greater wonder is that she didn’t do so years ago. In her leaving, she complains ‘how far right my party has moved’, but then she has been making complaints about the Tories for years.

Warsi has never been slow to accuse the Conservatives of Islamophobia. In June 2020, for example, following the murder of three men in Reading by an Islamist extremist – an asylum-seeker from Libya – it was the then Conservative government which caught her ire. Describing the murders as a ‘lone wolf’ attack, she said: ‘How can the government seek the support of a community that it needs to deal with these challenges when it simply refuses to work with that community?’.

In 2018, Warsi demanded an inquiry into Islamophobia within the Conservative party – and won her case. The