Key appointments for the new Conservative leader (3)

Does the party need a deputy leader, and what role could and should they play? And how can a new leader deal with foreign affairs and defence policy?

On Saturday 2 November, either Kemi Badenoch or Robert Jenrick will become the new leader of the Conservative and Unionist Party. It is a very old institution, dating in its modern form from 1834, when the former Home Secretary and Tory MP for Cashel, Chippenham, Oxford University and Westbury, Sir Robert Peel, issued a statement of principles to the electors in his new constituency of Tamworth in Staffordshire. But the old Tory Party had been part of the British political landscape for more than a century, and can trace its lineage back at least to the Exclusion Crisis of 1679. The winner of this autumn’s conquest takes on the leadership of the party of Harley, Bolingbroke, Pitt, Peel, Disraeli, Salisbury, Baldwin, Churchill, Macmillan and Thatcher.

In the days remaining, I have been looking at some of the positions which will be central to the revival of Conservative fortunes whether Badenoch or Jenrick is victorious. In the first essay, I looked at the roles of Shadow Chancellor and Shadow Home Secretary, then in the second I examined the positions of Party Chairman and Shadow Health and Social Care Secretary. In this instalment I want to spread the net a little more widely and focus on the deputy leadership of the party and the policy area of defence and foreign affairs.

Deputy Leader of the Conservative Party

The post of Deputy Leader is, in what may be a very Tory way, flexible and more recent that you might think. It is to be found nowhere in the party’s constitution, it has no formal remit or powers and its allocation, and indeed existence, is entirely within the gift of the leader. There have been official deputy leaders of the party, that is, people formally described as such by the Conservatives, and others who have been regarded and occasionally referred to as such by the media and other politicians. Sometimes it has been combined with the title of Deputy Prime Minister—which itself has been used both officially and unofficially—but there have been deputy leaders who were not deputy prime minister, and deputy prime ministers who were not deputy leader.

In fact there have only been four officially named and recognised Deputy Leaders of the party. The first was Reginald Maudling, who was appointed to the office by Edward Heath in August 1965 after Heath beat him to the party leadership. Maudling, a former Chancellor of the Exchequer, had been expected by some to win the contest to succeed Sir Alec Douglas-Home, the first time Conservative MPs had held a formal ballot to choose the leader. But, while he had held more senior offices than Heath in government, Maudling had coasted in opposition after October 1964, spending a great deal of time earning money through City directorships and indulging his fondness for alcohol. Heath, more aggressive and hard-edged, beat him by 150 to 133. The innovation of the deputy leadership was very plainly a consolation, as Iain Macleod became Shadow Chancellor and Peter Thorneycroft was named Shadow Home Secretary.

For a few months, Maudling acted as Shadow Foreign Secretary as well as Deputy Leader but in November 1965 was replaced in that position by Christopher Soames. He spoke on the Commonwealth for a time, hardly a front-line portfolio, and stepped into the breach as Shadow Defence Secretary when Enoch Powell was sacked in April 1968 for his inflammatory so-called “Rivers of Blood” speech on immigration. Geoffrey Rippon took over the brief in 1969. When Heath unexpectedly won the 1970 general election, his prospects might have been bleak. A New York Times profile of the new Conservative frontbenchers was heavy with euphemism, describing Maudling as “easygoing”, “remembered as fattest boy in school”, “relaxed and generally cheerful”.

There might have been no obvious berth for a deputy leader who had hardly committed body and soul to opposition, but the Shadow Home Secretary, Quintin Hogg, having disclaimed his hereditary peerage in 1963, was ennobled again as Lord Hailsham of St Marylebone and appointed to the post of Lord Chancellor, which his father had twice held (1928-29, 1935-38). This allowed Heath to send Maudling to the Home Office, a job commensurate with his status. When Iain Macleod died a month after becoming Chancellor of the Exchequer, there was considerable expectation that, in such an emergency, Maudling would replace him, having himself been Chancellor in 1962-64. But Heath chose the relatively insubstantial and malleable Anthony Barber, and Maudling remained Home Secretary until he was forced to resign in July 1972 because of his involvement with a bribery and corruption scandal. He ceased to be Deputy Leader of the party at the same time.

Reginald Maudling’s seven years as Deputy Leader hardly defined or demonstrated the worth of the office. He was never close to Edward Heath, remained wedded to economic ideas like an incomes policy from which the party was distancing itself and simply lacked motivation. His easygoing, reassuring nature sometimes slipped into gaffe, and when he became Home Secretary in 1970 he inherited responsibility for the deteriorating security situation in Northern Ireland which he had neither inclination nor determination to address (famously, leaving the province after a short visit, he declared “For God’s sake bring me a large Scotch. What a bloody awful country”). It was hardly surprising that he was not replaced as Deputy Leader when he resigned.

When Margaret Thatcher toppled Heath to become Conservative leader in February 1975, she was not the expected victor. Conventional wisdom said that, while she had headed Heath on the first ballot 130 to 119, a more heavyweight candidate would enter the second ballot and restore order. That candidate was supposed to be Heath’s close lieutenant Willie Whitelaw, who had been Leader of the House of Commons (1970-72), the inaugural Northern Ireland Secretary (1972-73), then Employment Secretary for the last four months of Heath’s government (1973-74). But Thatcher had momentum and comfortably beat Whitelaw 146 to 79, then shrewdly offered him the post of Deputy Leader.

Whitelaw accepted and served Thatcher loyally until he retired from the cabinet after a stroke in 1988. Just as he had been a steady and unwavering support to Heath as Chief Whip then Leader of the House, so he was invaluable to Thatcher, giving her the phlegmatic sturdiness of the landed classes and the unflinching reinforcement he had learned as second-in-command of his battalion of the Scots Guards during the Second World War. She would later write, “Willie is a big man in character as well as physically… once he had pledged his loyalty, he never withdrew it”. Ideologically, the two had little in common, and Whitelaw felt free to put his views in private, but outwardly he was stalwart. Thatcher liked and respected him, and most of the Conservative Party did too, those who regarded the leader with suspicion for her radicalism seeing him as a kind of restraining influence and guardian against chaos.

Initially, Whitelaw did not take a substantial shadow position, only speaking for the Opposition on devolution. But in January 1976 he became Shadow Home Secretary, and would be Home Secretary for the whole of the 1979-83 Parliament. Shortly after the general election, in which he had been returned for Penrith and the Border for the ninth time, Thatcher appointed him Leader of the House of Lords and ennobled him as Viscount Whitelaw. From 1979 to 1988 he acted as Deputy Prime Minister, though he was never formally given the title, and was an important factor behind the scenes in Whitehall negotiating among ministers and on the prime minister’s behalf. This combination of being Deputy Leader and effectively Deputy Prime Minister was everything Maudling had not been: influential, supportive and almost universally respected.

Although Whitelaw left cabinet at the end of 1988, he remained nominally Deputy Leader of the Party until August 1991. The title then fell into abeyance until the Conservatives had been ejected from office by Tony Blair at the 1997 general election. William Hague was elected as party leader that summer, and had to construct a shadow cabinet from a severely depleted talent pool (seven cabinet ministers had lost their seats), and initially he appointed the cerebral but rather bloodless Peter Lilley as Shadow Chancellor. Lilley was (and is) a strange figure: popularly imagined as a brutally doctrinaire Thatcherite who had been fierce in his denunciation of “benefit offenders” as Social Security Secretary from 1992 to 1997, Spitting Image portrayed him as a Nazi camp commandant. But he also supported the legalisation of marijuana and rejected compulsory identity cards.

Shadowing Gordon Brown in his first flush as Chancellor of the Exchequer, Lilley was ineffective. As a result, when Hague reshuffled his shadow cabinet in June 1998, he took Lilley away from the parliamentary front line and appointed him Deputy Leader of the Party, with a brief to develop long-term policies. As with Maudling, however, it was largely a sop; although Lilley was one of the most thoughtful and intelligent members of the shadow cabinet, he had little independent standing in the party. Giving the Rab Butler Memorial Lecture in April 1999, he warned that “there is more to life and more to Conservatism than defending and extending the free market” and that the party had to “stop identifying Conservatism uniquely with market economics”. It was a sensible, well-considered speech, but the headline—that the Conservatives had to move on from its Thatcherite phase—damaged his standing and forced Hague into defending his deputy’s position. At another reshuffle in June 1999, Lilley was removed from the shadow cabinet and was not replaced as Deputy Leader.

The last man—it has always thus far been a man—to be appointed Deputy Leader of the Conservative Party was Michael Ancram, Party Chairman from 1998 to 2001. He stood for the leadership when William Hague stepped down in 2001, coming last in the first two ballots of Conservative MPs and therefore being eliminated, but he then declared his support for the eventual winner, Iain Duncan Smith. His reward was to be named Deputy Leader and Shadow Foreign Secretary. Ancram (who died recently) was an amiable and engaging figure, quite without side despite his status as heir to the 12th Marquess of Lothian, and provided a reassuring element of normality compared to Duncan Smith’s faint air of Eurosceptic fanaticism. Although he had never been a cabinet minister—he looked like he ought to have been—he had served as a junior minister at the Scottish Office (1983-87) and the Northern Ireland Office (1993-97), while Duncan Smith had never been so much as a parliamentary private secretary, though he had served in Hague’s shadow cabinet speaking on social security then defence.

There was an argument that Duncan Smith and Ancram hardly made a particularly dynamic combination. But the latter was sufficiently reassuring and popular that he was retained as Deputy Leader by Duncan Smith’s successor, Michael Howard, stepping down only when David Cameron took over the leadership in 2005. The mild-mannered approach which had characterised his tepid 2001 bid for the top job—The Daily Telegraph described it as “healing hands”—proved well-suited to the deputy’s post: “neither Left nor Right”, “a broad church”, “a party that’s representative of the British people”. In September 2001, after two titanic election defeats in a row, it was an element of soothing normality to party needed.

Although the post of Deputy Leader of the Conservative Party has been vacant since Ancram retired in 2005, three Tories have officially been Deputy Prime Minister: Dominic Raab (2021-22, 2022-23), Dr Thérèse Coffey (2022) and Oliver Dowden (2023-24). Michael Heseltine had also held the office from 1995 to 1997, along with the nebulous title of First Secretary of State; this had also been used, without any allusion to the deputy premiership, by William Hague (2010-15), George Osborne (2015-16), Damian Green (2017) and Dominic Raab (2019-21). The rationale was probably that, while the party was in government, adding a formal deputy leadership did little or nothing to enhance the recipient’s status compared to offices of state.

A parallel development has been candidates for the party leadership forming “tickets”, with a formal candidate for leader and an ally who, it is understood, would take some formal deputising role. This had begun in 1997: William Hague, with less than two years’ experience in cabinet, had initially intended to be part of a ticket with Michael Howard, becoming Deputy Leader if Howard was successful; but Howard’s chances quickly faded, while Hague realised (correctly) he had a plausible chance of winning in his own right. Ahead of the third round of the contest, Kenneth Clarke, who had led until then, forged an unlikely alliance with arch-Thatcherite John Redwood, on the understanding that the latter would be Deputy Leader and Shadow Chancellor.

In 2016, Work and Pensions Secretary Stephen Crabb stood on a joint ticket with Business, Innovation and Skills Secretary Sajid Javid, while Michael Gove initially backed Boris Johnson, though without a formal arrangement to be Deputy Leader. Gove then withdrew his backing, offered himself as a candidate and Johnson decided not to stand.

The 2019 leadership election was chaotic and confusing, with 10 candidates eventually standing after three more announced an intention to stand but then withdrew, and another 18 expressing a public interest in the contest. Amber Rudd, the Work and Pensions Secretary and popular on the party’s left wing, was courted as a potential deputy by Boris Johnson, Michael Gove and Jeremy Hunt, but decided not to enter the contest. There were early rumours of Gove forming an alliance with Sajid Javid, though both ended up standing in their own right. Priti Patel was bruited as a Johnson running mate, while Liz Truss was also rumoured to be in demand. Gove himself had to deny suggestions he might form a joint ticket headed by Rory Stewart. In the end, no double acts competed for the crown, perhaps a reflection of the number of candidates willing to risk an individual candidacy.

When Boris Johnson reluctantly announced his resignation in July 2022, there was again a crowded field, with eight candidates taking part. Three more MPs announced leadership bids then withdrew, while there were expressions of interest by another nine. Jeremy Hunt, having been outside cabinet during Johnson’s premiership, announced that he would appoint Esther McVey as his deputy if he was elected. It was not a successful tactic, and Hunt was eliminated on the first ballot of MPs. After Liz Truss’s 49-day premiership, another election loomed. Rishi Sunak, the runner-up in September, was reported to have broached a joint ticket with both recently ousted Prime Minister Boris Johnson and third-placed candidate Penny Mordaunt. In the end, both declined to be part of a joint ticket but also eventually declined to run, leaving Sunak to become leader without opposition.

Last week, Robert Jenrick announced that, if he won the leadership contest, he would make James Cleverly his Deputy Leader, and invited Kemi Badenoch to make the same commitment. Cleverly, the former Home and Foreign Secretary and Party Chairman, had enjoyed a late surge in support for his own leadership bid but was unexpectedly then knocked out in the final ballot of MPs. Jenrick said:

I want to ensure that we look more professional and competent and calmer and be soberly addressing the big challenges facing the country, as well as bringing the most talented people back into the Conservative Party. I have said that, for example, whoever wins this leadership contest, James Cleverly should be deputy leader of the Conservative Party so that there is a sense that the Conservative family is coming back together, uniting and putting on a much stronger approach to the public again.

He has already, as readers will recall, promised to appoint Sir Jacob Rees-Mogg as Chairman of the Party in the event that he wins the leadership. Badenoch has given no indication of whether she would appoint a deputy leader and, if so, whom she might choose.

What is a deputy leader for? Given that the post is wholly in the gift of the leader, there are three main purposes, which are not mutually exclusive. The first, which has influenced the development of leadership “tickets” and is reminiscent of American politics, is to allow a candidate for the leadership or an incumbent leader to appeal to a constituency which does not already support him or her. That constituency can be ideological, geographical, demographic or presentational: when Jeremy Hunt and Esther McVey teamed up in 2022, for example, it did not take much insight to see why the Charterhouse- and Magdalen College, Oxford-educated son of a Royal Navy admiral, born in London and raised in Surrey, might want the support of a Liverpool-born and Scouse-accented former journalist and presenter who had spent her first years in foster care. Equally, in 2019, Amber Rudd was courted by several candidates because she was a likeable, centrist, pro-Remain politician, an obvious foil to Boris Johnson or Michael Gove.

The second role a deputy leader can play is as a kind of enforcer-cum-cheerleader, overlapping in some ways with the position of Party Chairman: a good communicator who is not limited to a particular brief but can be trusted to undertake media appearances or speaking engagements with aplomb. In this case, a leader would want to be certain that his or her deputy was unquestionably loyal, as the temptation to begin building an alternative power base would be significant. This was part of Willie Whitelaw’s brief under Margaret Thatcher, though he soon also acquired the job of Shadow Home Secretary.

The third possible position for a deputy leader is as a thinker, the intellectual driving force behind a new policy platform. It was this role that William Hague tried to fill with Peter Lilley in 1998-99, without conspicuous success; more often, however, it has been assigned to other ministers or shadow cabinet members. Most obviously, Sir Keith Joseph undertook the task for Thatcher between 1975 and 1979, while Oliver Letwin was Chairman of the party’s Policy Review (and Chairman of the Conservative Research Department) under David Cameron 2005-10.

There is absolutely no requirement for the party to have a deputy leader. On the other hand, it is a “free” office for the party leader to exploit if he or she so wishes, and, as Jenrick suggested, Badenoch could indeed do worse than asking James Cleverly to fill the role. Cleverly is well regarded as a communicator, has cabinet experience including two of the four great offices of state and is a former Party Chairman, as well as possessing an unusual degree of “normality” for a front-line politician. Of her other declared supporters, none leaps off the page as an obvious anchor or all-purpose cheerleader, except conceivably Mel Stride; she could add weight by appointing a veteran like Sir David Davis or Sir Iain Duncan Smith but neither seems especially likely. And at 44, Badenoch has no need to appoint a deputy who could one day succeed to the top job.

More than almost any other position, the role of Deputy Leader of the Conservative Party is defined by its context and its occupant. He or she can be a very senior member of the party’s front bench, like Willie Whitelaw, or a virtual sinecure, like Peter Lilley. We know that James Cleverly will be appointed if Robert Jenrick becomes leader; if Kemi Badenoch is victorious, she might think for a while whether it is a useful post or if she has enough patronage at her disposal.

Defence and foreign affairs

The conventional wisdom is that elections are won on solidly and prosaically domestic concerns, especially on economic policy and its consequences. This logic tends to put the opposition spokesmen on foreign affairs and defence in the shade: who remembers that Labour’s would-be Foreign Secretary going into the general election of 1992 was Gerald Kaufman, or that Edward Heath’s principal spokesman on defence in advance of the 1970 election was Geoffrey Rippon? These posts have a sheen of seriousness and seniority because of the subject matter but are rarely at the forefront of the electorate’s consciousness.

The obvious exception to this, for at least a decade now, has been the issue of Europe and the United Kingdom’s relationship with the European Union. While this was a deeply divisive policy area for Labour in the 1970s—Roy Jenkins resigned as Deputy Leader in 1972 over Harold Wilson’s approach to the Common Market—it became an albatross around the neck of the Conservatives by the 1990s, with bitter in-fighting over the Maastricht Treaty, the Exchange Rate Mechanism and the single currency proving enormously damaging to John Major’s government. Since the Brexit referendum of 2016, however, it has been an issue of major concern for all parties: just as the Conservatives grappled with what a post-EU Britain should look like, so the current government is devoting considerable energy to “resetting” its relationship with Europe.

Unusually, over the past two or three years, defence has also crept up the public agenda. Several factors have focused attention: Russia’s 2022 full-scale invasion of Ukraine, doubts over the United States’ commitment to NATO in the event of Donald Trump becoming president for a second term, and the widespread series of conflicts in the Middle East. At the same time, it has become increasingly clear that the armed forces are under such extreme pressure that they are not at full operational readiness and have major substantial shortfalls. It was indicative of the unusual prominence of defence that Rishi Sunak made increasing military expenditure to 2.5 per cent of gross domestic product a campaign issue earlier in the year.

The opposition will need to engage with the outcome of the government’s Strategic Defence Review, which is scheduled to report in the first half of 2025. The terms of reference make the SDR a strange beast, intended to be wide-ranging but with several policy areas ruled out of its scope: the independent nuclear deterrent, the importance of NATO, support for Ukraine, the AUKUS partnership and “defence ties to the Indo Pacific region, the Gulf and the Middle East”. Nevertheless, once the government responds to the conclusions and recommendations of the review team led by Lord Robertson of Port Ellen, the Conservatives will also need to have a response and some indication of the direction of their thinking. The SDR provides an opportunity to consider the future of the United Kingdom’s military posture and armed forces from first principles and construct policy for the current geopolitical context.

In international relations, there are several strands of policy on which government policy must be scrutinised as well as the foundations of a Conservative approach laid down. The government is “auditing” the United Kingdom’s relationship with China, although the Foreign Secretary’s recent visit to Beijing suggests a guarded eagerness to engage economically with the People’s Republic. Sir Keir Starmer wants to “reset” our interactions with the European Union and agree a defence and security pact, but is anxious about other areas of co-operation such as freedom of movement, and wary of any hint of revisiting Brexit. Negotiating the ongoing “special relationship” is a challenge the shape of which will depend enormously on who wins next week’s United States presidential election.

The first duty of an opposition is to oppose, and that critique of the government’s policies is the priority for the Conservatives. There is also an extent to which opposition foreign policy is an exercise in let’s-pretend, an organisation with no executive power responding to circumstances with which someone else is dealing. Towards the next general election, however, the party will be expected to have mapped out broad instincts at the very least.

The current interim shadow cabinet is especially interim in terms of foreign affairs and defence. The outgoing Foreign Secretary was a member of the House of Lords, former Prime Minister Lord Cameron of Chipping Norton, while the Defence Secretary, Grant Shapps, was defeated in his Welwyn Hatfield constituency. The former role is therefore currently shadowed by veteran Andrew Mitchell, formerly Deputy Foreign Secretary, while the latter portfolio is being overseen by James Cartlidge, who was Defence Procurement Minister from 2023 to 2024. Mitchell is now 68, first entered the Commons in 1987 and was a junior minister under John Major, so is likely to retire to the backbenches. Cartlidge may on the other hand remain in play.

Shadowing the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office and the Ministry of Defence is a complicated affair. It requires sharp-edged opportunism as well as deep and imaginative strategic thinking, and patience to labour on the fringes of public interest while occasionally experiencing the glare of the spotlight.

There are a number of senior Conservatives with relevant political and professional experience who might fit somewhere into the new opposition team dealing with these issues: James Cleverly, a former Foreign Secretary and Home Secretary; Tom Tugendhat, ex-Minister for Security and Intelligence Corps officer; John Glen, previously a cabinet minister who served on the House of Commons Defence Committee and completed a master’s degree in international security at the Royal College of Defence Studies; Alicia Kearns, former Chair of the Foreign Affairs Committee and previously an official at the FCO and the MoD. In the second rank, the House of Lords can offer a number of plausible figures to assist in the task: Lord Benyon, the Earl Howe, Lord Lancaster of Kimbolton, Lord De Mauley, the Earl of Minto, Lord Swire.

Compared to some other appointments, these are posts which allow a degree of experimentation. They will grow in importance over the course of the parliament, but if a Shadow Foreign Secretary or Shadow Defence Secretary did not quite work out as planned, it would not be a calamity; he or she could be replaced with little harm. Cleverly and Tugendhat, as leadership contenders, would seem the most obvious choices, but whether Jenrick or Badenoch is making the decision, there are myriad factors to take into account, including the demands of other posts and the overall composition of the shadow cabinet.

The final straight

The result of the leadership election will be announced in two days’ time. I could go through the whole shadow cabinet and assess the requirements for each post and policy area, but these three essays have, I hope, provided some insights or points of interest. I am curious to see how quickly a new frontbench team is unveiled by the eventual winner: each will, presumably, be impatient to make a start, but with the announcement being made at the weekend, it may take some time for the new Leader of the Opposition’s Office to contact candidates for preferment. In any event, I would expect a fresh shadow cabinet to be in place by close of play on Monday. Its shape may reveal a great deal about the future of the Conservative Party.