Suella Braverman has announced she will withdraw from the Conservative leadership contest because the party does not want to hear the truth about why it lost the election.

The former home secretary said she had the required 10 MPs backing her candidacy to get her above the threshold to enter the race.

But in an exclusive article for The Telegraph, she says there was no point “for good or ill” in someone like her “running to lead the Tory Party when most of the MPs disagree with my diagnosis and prescription”.

“The traumatised party does not want to hear these things said out loud,” she writes.

The move is likely to bolster former immigration minister Robert Jenrick’s run for the leadership as her standing would likely have split the Right-wing vote.

It is understood that one of the MPs who nominated her was Sir John Hayes, the influential chairman of the Common Sense group of MPs, who is now expected to switch to Mr Jenrick.

The centrist MPs Tom Tugendhat, James Cleverly and Mel Stride as well as, on the Right, the former home secretary Dame Priti Patel, have also thrown their hats into the ring. Kemi Badenoch, the shadow housing secretary, and a potential frontrunner has also declared her candidacy.

In her article, Mrs Braverman says the “disastrous” election result was not “some freak, ‘loveless landslide’ for Labour but because the Tories “got things monumentally wrong”.

She says that this was the reason she apologised on election night and “meant it”, both then and now.

Mrs Braverman won her Fareham and Waterloo seat with a majority of more than 6,000, telling voters that she was “sorry my party didn’t listen to you”.

She wrote that the party’s overall loss “was predicted, preventable, deserved and, as yet, unaddressed”.

The “disaster”, she said, was down to the Tories’ failure to keep its promises on cutting record levels of immigration, reducing taxes, which instead went to a 70-year high, disabling public services by overreacting to Covid and reversing the Blairite legacy of international and domestic human rights laws.

She says: “It’s not comfortable accepting these truths. I’ve tried to set them out and been vilified by some colleagues. But it is what it is.

“Anyone who leads our party needs to accept them or else prepare for a decade in the wilderness.

“I can only apologise to the people who backed me to stand. To the thousands of party members and the many disenchanted ex-Conservative voters who have written to me, I’m sorry.

“I cannot run because I cannot say what people want to hear. I do not complain about this – it’s democracy in action and worked for Keir Starmer. I’ve been branded mad, bad and dangerous enough to see that the Tory Party does not want to hear the truths I’ve set out. And so I will bow out here.”

Mrs Braverman warned that Nigel Farage’s Reform UK party posed an “existential threat” to the Tories which would not be neutralised by comparing them to the Nazis, referring to a jibe made by Mr Farage’s unsuccessful Tory rival in Clacton. She has previously said the Conservative Party should embrace Reform and its four million voters.

Mrs Braverman and Mr Jenrick have both called for the UK to quit the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) as one of the key measures to enable the UK to solve the small boats crisis – a central plank of Reform’s policy on immigration.

“Nigel Farage destroyed us. We have no hope of recovery until we win back the trust of the four million. Branding them as racists and comparing their events to Nuremberg Rallies did not work during the campaign and it won’t work now,” she said.

Mrs Braverman also criticises candidates for the leadership who had come out with “fashionable platitudes” about the need for unity. Mr Cleverly and Mr Stride have both pitched themselves as unity candidates.

“That’s all fine but it’s not honest,” she says.

She cites her own rebellions in Cabinet when she pushed Rishi Sunak to quit the ECHR and take a tougher stance on human rights laws.  “When, two years ago, I argued that we needed to leave the ECHR to stop the boats, it’s because it was true,” she says.

Mrs Braverman suggested that one of the reasons the Conservatives lost the election was because they were too united, nodding through policies such as the smoking ban, pedicabs, tax rises and the Windsor framework and even the “misguided” early election.

“Not enough colleagues joined us, instead putting ‘unity’ above a fatally flawed law that failed to stop the boats – as we predicted. Compare that to the paralysis that crippled Theresa May’s government. Now that was division,” she said.

“One moral of this story is that so many colleagues were lost at the altar of unity. Not because of occasional comment from backbenchers.”

Nominations close on Monday evening, paving the way for voting by MPs which will whittle down the candidates to four who will present their cases to the conference in October before the winner is declared on Nov 2.

Dozens of Wagner mercenaries were killed and a Russian helicopter was destroyed in an ambush by al-Qaeda-allied rebels in Mali.

Nikita Fedyanin, the editor and owner of the Grey Zone Wagner Telegram channel and a leading Kremlin propagandist, was also killed in the attack in the Sahara Desert.

Jama’at Nusrat al-Islam wal-Muslimeen (JNIM), an al-Qaeda-linked group, claimed responsibility for the attack on the Wagner convoy near the desert town of Tinzawatene on the border with Algeria.

In one video, an Arab man, who appears to be a commander, can be seen inspecting a captured vehicle as Tuareg fighters, wearing flowing robes, turbans and sunglasses, celebrate.

Through a Telegram channel, JNIM said: “Jihadists used several powerful IEDs to stop the convoy,” and the ambush killed “50 Wagner mercenaries and 10 Malian soldiers”.

“The militants finished off some of the wounded. Among the bodies of the military, men of European appearance are clearly distinguishable,” it said.

Footage across social media shows dozens of bodies in camouflage uniforms strewn across the sand. Some of the dead wore Orthodox crosses around their necks.

In one photo, the wreckage of a helicopter lies in between the ruins of mud houses, and in another a military truck appears to have been up-ended.

Further footage shows a Tuareg fighter taunting a half-naked Russian-speaking fighter. A rebel commander later offered to send Wagner prisoners, including a senior commander, to Ukraine to help its “struggle for justice and freedom”.

Fedyanin had been travelling with the convoy when he was killed in the attack, according to reports.

In his last message on the Grey Zone, Fedyanin posted photographs of heavily armed Wagner fighters posing in front of a burning tree in the desert above the sardonic caption: “It’s hot in Africa, literally and figuratively.”

Fedyanin had complained earlier this month that organising convoys across the desert was difficult with local allies, who he described as unreliable.

“It is sometimes difficult to organise convoys with allies due to, let’s say, their mentality,” he said. “In the Middle East and Africa, locals live a leisurely life.”

Anastasia Kashevarova, a Wagner cheerleader and military blogger with 250,000 subscribers, corroborated the attack.

According to Ms Kashevarova, the badly equipped Wagner convoy with poorly trained soldiers was lured into the ambush after leaving Tinzawatene by a small group of rebel fighters used as bait.

“They chased them and were drawn into the ambush. The number of enemies greatly exceeded ours. Almost all of our men were killed,” she said.

Many experienced fighters quit Wagner after the rebellion in 2023 when command of the unit was subverted to the Russian Ministry of Defence, Ms Kashevarova said. Since then the standard of the group has weakened significantly.

The Kremlin has been sending arms and mercenaries to fuel wars and prop up its allies in Africa for more than a decade and it is blamed for encouraging a series of coups against democratically elected leaders across the region.

This leverage in Africa has become more important to the Kremlin since its invasion of Ukraine in 2022 as it sees the continent as another theatre to challenge Western dominance.

The US has said that Wagner forces have been deployed in Mali since 2020 to prop up a military junta.

Two Just Stop Oil activists jailed for disrupting thousands of motorists after they scaled a gantry on the M25 say they have been “waltzing” around their prison cell to music.

Cressida Gethin, 22, and Lucia Whittaker De Abreu, 35, spoke in a joint statement from prison of the “injustice of what has been done to us”, while at the same time revealing they have been “waltzing round our cell to music playing on our little plastic television”.

The pair were among five Just Stop Oil activists sentenced to prison after being found guilty by a jury of disrupting the M25 motorway for four days in 2022, causing 50,000 hours of delays for over 700,000 vehicles, including those attending funerals and hospital appointments.

De Abreu and Gethin were convicted earlier this month and sentenced to four years, along with Roger Hallam, Daniel Shaw and Louise Lancaster, for conspiracy to cause a public nuisance for coordinating direct action protests on the motorway.

The pair said their imprisonment meant they now joined hundreds of women who have been “abjectly failed” by society.

Speaking from her jail cell, Gethin said her fellow inmates understood the “injustice” of what had been done more than “most people on the street”.

In the statement, Gethin, a Cambridge University student and former Hereford Cathedral School pupil, said: “Nowhere is the violence of the system more obvious, nowhere is it clearer how our profit-driven economy stamps on anyone and anything that doesn’t conform.

“People here have to fight to survive, the resilience and resourcefulness is inspiring.

“If Judge Hehir believes that sending non-violent action-takers to prison will break us and extinguish the resistance, he will be disappointed.”

After Gethin was jailed along with De Abreu, Hallam, Shaw and Lancaster, her mother, Cathy, from Herefordshire, said: “At the age of 22 she was the youngest defendant and she has just been sentenced today to four years in prison. This means she will not be present at her brother’s wedding next summer.

“Cressida also grew up completely understanding right and wrong. She has always been unable to stand by when she sees injustice.

“She has the courage of a lion and a moral compass that compels her to step forward when she sees wrong.”

Ms Gethin, a bell ringer at her local church, added: “Like many of the defendants, Cressida tried polite routes to protest and to persuade to affect change. But when she heard the science and saw that no one was paying attention, she felt she had no option.”

Prosecutors alleged Just Stop Oil’s M25 blockade, in which 45 people scaled the gantries, led to an economic cost of at least £765,000, while the cost to the Metropolitan Police was more than £1.1 million.

One person suffering an aggressive form of cancer missed a vital appointment due to the chaos and had to wait two months to be seen as a result. Others were late for flights while some even missed funerals due to traffic jams caused by the protest.

Jeremy Bamber investigators may have lied about evidence that led to his conviction and put him behind bars for 39 years, an investigation is expected to suggest.

Bamber is serving life after being found guilty of murdering his adoptive parents, Nevill and June, both 61, his sister, Sheila Caffell, 26, and her six-year-old twins, Daniel and Nicholas, at White House Farm, near the village of Tolleshunt D’Arcy in Essex, in August 1985.

He has always protested his innocence and claims that Caffell, who suffered from schizophrenia, shot her family before turning the gun on herself.

Now a 17,000-word investigation by The New Yorker, expected to be published on Monday, is said to have highlighted more than a dozen apparent discrepancies in the prosecution’s case.

The magazine, which also raised doubts over Lucy Letby’s conviction, spoke to officers present in the aftermath of the murders and who are believed to have substantiated Bamber’s claim that police interfered with the crime scene.

The eighth-month investigation has focused on claims that Essex Police altered witness statements, lied about evidence and withheld and concealed evidence, The Mail on Sunday reported.

Bamber told the newspaper: “If restaging of the crime scene is a major new point in The New Yorker story, that will enable us to go directly back to the Court of Appeal, which I hope will be within a few days of us having the fresh evidence in our hands.

“The Court of Appeal has already said restaging the crime scene would be a mortal sin, so we’ll be straight back to the Court of Appeal asap, asking for bail pending a full appeal.”

The investigation is also said to have raised questions about the Criminal Cases Review Commission, which Bamber’s legal team says has failed to act on submissions that would exonerate him.

Bamber claims that his sister Sheila, a model and diagnosed paranoid schizophrenic, suffered a psychotic episode and carried out the murders before turning the gun on herself.

However, the prosecution argued that a silencer that was on the rile would have made it too long for Sheila’s fingers to reach the trigger and shoot herself.

Another key issue in the case is whether Bamber had received a call from his father on the night of the murder telling him Sheila had stolen one of his guns and gone “berserk”.

Police said that Nevill made no such call but lawyers unearthed a phone log of a call on the night of the killings from Nevill entitled “daughter gone berserk”.

Meanwhile, a bloodstained Bible, found by Sheila’s side, was never forensically examined or produced at trial despite a request from Bamber’s solicitor.

He was convicted in October 1986 by a 10–2 majority verdict and sentenced to a minimum of 25 years in prison. In 1994, he was told that he would never be released.

The Court of Appeal upheld the verdict in 2002.

In 2020, he lost an appeal to be downgraded from maximum security prison.

Bamber sought permission for a High Court challenge over a decision taken in March by the director of the long-term and high-security estate – part of the Prison and Probation Service – not to downgrade him from a Category A inmate, or to direct that an oral hearing on the issue take place.

Category A prisoners are considered the most dangerous to the public and are held in maximum security conditions.

At a remote hearing in October that year, lawyers for Bamber asked Mr Justice Julian Knowles to give the go-ahead for a full hearing of Bamber’s claim, arguing that the decision was “unreasonable”.

Mr Justice Knowles refused Bamber permission to bring the challenge.

Bamber had an appeal against his convictions dismissed by the Court of Appeal in 2002 and had a High Court challenge to the Criminal Cases Review Commission’s (CCRC) refusal to refer his case for another appeal rejected in 2012.

A spokesman for the Jeremy Bamber campaign of innocence told the Mail on Sunday: “The CCRC have had Jeremy Bamber’s latest submissions since March 2021 and… they have not investigated any of the key exculpatory issues they contain, which demonstrate Jeremy Bamber’s innocence.”

A spokesman for Essex Police said: “In August 1985 the lives of five people, including two children, were needlessly, tragically and callously cut short when they were murdered in their own home by Jeremy Bamber.

“In the years that followed, this case has been the subject of several appeals and reviews by the Court of Appeal and the Criminal Cases Review Commission – all of these processes have never found anything other than Bamber is the person responsible for killing his adoptive parents Nevill and June, sister Sheila Caffell and her two sons Nicholas and Daniel.

“Essex Police have continued to comply with all legal requirements in this case and will continue to assist the CCRC as required.”

An RAF squadron has dropped its “Crusaders” nickname following a complaint it is offensive to Muslims.

14 Squadron, one of the RAF’s longest-serving and most senior squadrons, achieved the moniker after its airmen flew sorties over Gaza and Palestine during the First World War.

However, crews have been ordered to remove any references to Crusaders around their hangar after a senior officer upheld an RAF crew member’s complaint insisting the term was insulting.

The Crusades were a series of religious wars between Christians and Muslims during the medieval era that began primarily to gain control of holy sites considered sacred by both groups.

The first 30 years of 14 Squadron’s history were closely linked to the Middle East. More recently, its pilots were involved in the first Gulf War in 1991 and Kosovo in 1999.

The change was sparked following a single complaint from an RAF crew member, according to the Mail on Sunday.

‘Part of our history’

One aviator told the newspaper: “If they’d have asked members of the squadron, rather than dictating this change, almost everyone would have been in favour of retaining ‘Crusaders’, because it is so much part of our history.

“There was never any prejudice or malice in the name. Every squadron, every regiment has a past. But if that past doesn’t suit current thinking it will be erased.”

Officials said the RAF’s focus must not be on giving prominence to offensive terms that may go against the values of the service, and that while nicknames may have a place in its history, some are “no longer appropriate”.

An RAF spokesman said: “As a modern and diverse service, our focus must be on not giving prominence to any offensive term that goes against the values of the Royal Air Force. Therefore, 14 Squadron have ceased using their historic unofficial nickname.

“The traditions and informal nicknames used by the RAF in the earlier days have a place in our history. However, some are no longer appropriate in the 21st Century.”

The RAF’s review of historic terminology is ongoing and there may be further changes, it is understood.

A bumper supply of strawberries is expected in the coming weeks thanks to a spell of warm weather following a rainy and cloudy start to the summer.

Around 200 tonnes of surprise strawberries from growers across the country will hit Tesco shelves following the rise in temperatures and extra sunshine, while supermarket Asda has described it as an “exceptional summer” for the fruit.

Mansfields, the fruit grower, said despite cloudy skies, the quality of strawberries growing was “very good”, with the conditions meaning the fruit had been given more time to develop.

It comes as the UK is expected to bask in temperatures of up to 32C in the next few days.

The Met Office said London could reach 32C by Tuesday while long-term forecasts remain warm despite the chance of thunderstorms during the week.

The heatwave threshold is met when a location records at least three consecutive days with maximum temperatures exceeding a designated value, according to the Met Office.

This is 25C for most of the UK but rises to 28C in London and its surrounding area, where temperatures are typically higher.

The warm surge is down to a wave of high pressure across the country and warm air rising from the south, creating dry, fine and sunny conditions and bringing temperatures up.

The highest temperature of the year so far was July 19, peaking at 31.9C in St James’ Park, London.

The temperature across England is expected to rise throughout the start of next week until Wednesday, when the warm conditions may be brought to an abrupt end when they could turn into thunderstorms.

It is this kind of changing weather that is thought to have had a lasting effect on this year’s crop of British strawberries.

Lee Port, the chief executive of the Chartham-based growers, said: “The cold and wet spell earlier in the year plus the recent mini-heatwave has resulted in pushing more of our predicted crop volume into late July and early August.

“This will result in an abundance of strawberries – roughly an extra 40 to 50 tonnes per week until the end of August.

“The good news is that they are big, juicy and luscious.”

Nick Marston, the chairman of British Berry Growers, said: “Cold, wet weather and reduced sunlight hours this spring meant that Britain’s strawberry crop arrived late this year.

“But the good news is they are worth the wait.

“The slower ripening period has allowed flavours to develop as the strawberries grow, meaning they are particularly large and juicy.

“It is a fantastic year for British strawberries.

“British berries are big business for the UK economy with year-round retail sales reaching an all-time high of £1.87 billion in the UK alone.”