A Pakistani-origin British Conservative Party MP, who recently resigned from the Cabinet over the Cameron government's stance on the Gaza conflict, has warned that her party is headed for defeat in the next General Election in 2015.
Baroness Sayeeda Warsi, who had been appointed as Britain's first female Muslim Cabinet minister when Prime Minister David Cameron took charge in 2010, feels the Conservative party has neglected ethnic minority voters.
"I will be out there, vocally fighting for an outright Conservative majority. But the electoral reality is that we will not win outright Conservative majorities until we start attracting more of the ethnic vote," she told 'The Sunday Times' in her first interview since her dramatic resignation last week.
Warsi said that when she was one of Cameron's earliest supporters in 2005, "I looked at him and said, 'This is a guy who gets today's Britain. He's a new kind of Conservative, comfortable with today's Britain.'"
But making plain her disillusionment with the prime minister, she added, "I think the party has shifted since then. The party leadership has shifted since then. I think over time it will be a regressive move because we have to appeal to all of Britain, not just because it's morally the right thing to do... But because it is an electoral reality.
"We've probably left it a little too late to take this part of the electorate seriously."
Lashing out at colleagues who had criticised her move to step down over Britain's "morally indefensible" stance over the Israel-Palestine conflicts as reflective of her inability to do the job, she said: "Some of the bitchiest women I've ever met in my life are the men in politics."
"I am a brown, working-class woman from the north. People have been telling me I'm not good enough since the day I was born."
She also attacked senior Cabinet figures close contact with the Israeli government.
"People like George Osborne and Michael Gove are very, very close to the Israeli government and the Israeli leadership. What is the point of having that strong relationship if you can't use it to move them to a position which is in their interests and our interests," she said.
The Conservatives had won a 36 per cent share of the vote at the last election, but gained the support of just 16 per cent of ethnic minority voters.
The Number 10 policy unit had been looking at ways to narrow this gap and woo voters with their roots in the Indian subcontinent who have traditionally voted for the Opposition Labour party.
