The future of the Conservative Party (1)
If the Tories lose on 4 July, the party will undergo substantial change, but I differ from some of the common beliefs and tropes currently in circulation
The coming election
I feel fairly confident I will be returning to this theme quite frequently in coming weeks and months so I thought it wise to mark it as the first in a series. Assuming that the polls are broadly correct and that the Labour Party wins the general election, the Conservatives will return to opposition after 14 years, Rishi Sunak will surely resign briskly as leader and there will be an election to replace him. This will run alongside and will overlap with, but will not be the same thing as, a debate about the nature and fundamental philosophy of the Conservative Party. It will be affected by a huge number of factors, many of which are currently unknown and unknowable, but we can start sketching in some of the details.
At this stage I will only offer a few observations and suggestions. Anyone who says they know what will happen is either lying or possessed of a kind of foresight with which they could make a fortune at the races. There are known knowns, known unknowns and, most likely, unknown unknowns, to channel the late Donald Rumsfeld, and none of them exists in a vacuum. Each has an effect on the other, and the consequences spread, so each guess you make can, in theory, send you further and further from what will end up being the truth.
Esther Webber, who is wise and sharp, tackled the subject in Politico under the gloomy headline “Tories braced for brutal civil war”. She rightly points to the fact that there is an important role for the parliamentary party in a leadership contest, and the composition of that is unknown until after the general election. Conservative MPs must provide the candidates for a leadership election, supply each candidate with a certain number of nominations and then whittle the field of hopefuls, however large it is, down to a final two, who are then presented to the party’s membership as a whole. As she says, “exactly who keeps their seat at the election, and who fails to do so, will be key to the outcome”.
In 2022, there were initially eight candidates for the leadership, which over five ballots the parliamentary party reduced to a final two of Liz Truss and Rishi Sunak. In 2019, there were 10 candidates, and again there were five ballots over which that field was reduced to Boris Johnson and Jeremy Hunt. In 2016, there was eventually only one candidate, Theresa May, who was therefore acclaimed without a contest, but four other MPs formally lodged candidacies only to withdraw; another four publicly declared they would seek the leadership but in the end did not proceed; and there were 17 others who either expressed interest or were widely tipped in the media as potential runners. Back in 2005, when David Cameron was elected, there were four candidates, requiring only two ballots of MPs, and three others declared themselves candidates but ended up withdrawing.
The recent leadership elections of 2022 and 2019 have indicated a willingness on the part of MPs to “have a go”, at least at the stage of expressing interest, however implausible their candidacies may be. I pointed out in an essay last year that 19 MPs in 2019 thought Matt Hancock was the best choice for leader, which was a somewhat unlikely idea even before his weaknesses were fully exposed during the Covid-19 pandemic, which indicates the power of ambition. Equally, without wishing to be unnecessarily unkind, those publicly imagining themselves as potential premiers that year also included Philip Hammond, Steve Baker and Graham Brady. In the summer of 2022, Nadine Dorries, Bill Wiggin, John Baron and Steve Baker (again) spoke openly of considering a tilt at the leadership. So it is dangerous to rule out anyone on the grounds of sheer implausibility.
Another factor we have to bear in mind when comparing a future contest with those which have gone before is that in 2016, 2019 and 2022, the candidates were competing not only for the leadership of their party but the post of prime minister and first lord of the Treasury. Since the Conservative Party began formally electing its leader in 1965, changes have taken place in opposition more often than not: the contests in 1990, 2016, 2019 and 2022 were for the premiership, but the leadership changed in opposition six times, in 1965, 1975, 1997, 2001, 2003 and 2005. (If it is statistically relevant, in only three of those six cases did the victor go on at some point to be prime minister.) A leadership contest in the second half of 2024 will not only be for the role of leader of the opposition, but it is unlikely to provide an imminent platform for the premiership. This is not pessimism: basic arithmetic and precedent tell us that if the Labour Party wins a large majority on 5 July, it is unlikely to be reversed in its entirely at the following election. Of course, all of this is under the caveat that anything can happen at backgammon.
That circumstance may act as a degree of self-selection. MPs are by their nature ambitious, and that is no criticism: they are people who want to get on, who want to achieve things and make a difference, and that is a powerful motive force towards making a bid for the leadership of the party. In some potential candidates, however, that will be tempered by the prospect of the hard yards of leading a (perhaps small) opposition party. Although this is beyond the direct experience of most of those who will be Conservative MPs in the next parliament, being in opposition is much less fun and much less rewarding than being in government. There is, certainly for frontbench spokesmen, much less support than for a ministerial position, and you have virtually no direct power or influence. Your media cachet as an opposition backbencher is, generally, even lower than as a government MP (though serial rebels and members of the awkward squad gain a certain currency). More fundamentally, you are part of a much smaller family, and, however formulaic some of it may be, you will spend a lot of your parliamentary week simply losing at things.
If Labour wins a substantial majority and the Conservative Party forms a reduced opposition, it is a basic law of political life that for a year or two no-one will really care what the leader of the opposition thinks. John Major expressed it with surprising eloquence in his final party conference speech in Blackpool in October 1997. “It’s difficult being the leader of a newly defeated party. For a while, people won’t wish to listen to what we have to say.” He offered hope that matters would change, perhaps more quickly than his audience expected, though that proved an inaccurate forecast and there were 13 years of Labour government until the next Conservative prime minister. The next leader will spend a lot of time initially fighting hard for scraps of public and media attention, trying to balance energetic opposition and long-term self-reflection and reconstruction. There will not be enough hours in the day, yet each of them will drag with leaden feet. Prime Minister’s Questions will be a weekly ordeal, facing a large body of enthusiastic, confident government MPs.
For all of this, people will want to do it. There will be no shortage, I suspect, of candidates who want the opportunity to lead the Conservative Party, whether to shape its future direction, succeed where colleagues fail or simply fulfil a basic personal ambition. These motivations may be intermingled. Again, it’s important to say that there is nothing wrong with that. It is a rare politician who declines to seek a position of leadership because they don’t think they are suited for it; Sir Keith Joseph was briefly touted as a replacement for Edward Heath in 1974, but his heart was never in it. He observed later “I hadn’t the political antennae, the political flair”, and, while his intellectual efforts and policy development were fundamental to Margaret Thatcher’s long premiership, he was sufficiently self-aware to recognise that he lacked the ability to connect with voters in any personal way or inspire them.
After that preamble, there are a few general observations about the condition of politics after the next election which are worth making.
Survival
There has been much talk, understandably given the opinion polls, of the Conservative Party facing an “existential crisis” or “extinction-level event”. The supposition is that it might fare so badly in the polls and retain so few seats that it is overtaken by the Liberal Democrats, or is seriously challenged by Reform UK, or simply finds itself so small it is no longer sustainable as a major political party. This is certainly an outcome for which Nigel Farage is hoping. Based on the data available, it cannot be ruled out.
This may turn out to be an enormous hostage to fortune, and it is only my opinion based on the indefinable combination of observation, judgement, experience and instinct, but I don’t think the party is in “existential” danger. Don’t get me wrong, it could suffer a dreadful reverse of a kind not seen since 1906 or perhaps even further back, but I don’t think it will be dealt a mortal blow. Insofar as I can adduce evidence in support of this, I would argue that there is a substantial, broadly “conservative” constituency in the British electorate, and however many of those voters may abjure the Conservative Party on 4 July they are sufficiently numerous to continue providing it with a purpose and potential support. In addition, I don’t think Reform UK has the strength in depth to mount a sustained challenge to the Conservative Party’s position. It remains, to all intents and purposes, a platform for Nigel Farage, a listed company owned and controlled by him, and its ongoing travails over candidate selection as well as its previous financial problems suggest it is not a long-term proposition.
More fundamentally, the Tory Party is tough. Some date the creation of the modern party to its merger with the Liberal Unionists in May 1912, or Sir Robert Peel’s publication of his Tamworth Manifesto in December 1834. It is perfectly plausible, however, to trace the party’s roots further back through the “Friends of Mr Pitt” who coalesced around the young William Pitt in the 1780s, to the Tory Party of Georgian England all the way back to the Exclusion Crisis of 1679. The historiographical arguments are hard-fought by many eminent scholars but the “long history” thesis is not utterly far-fetched.
Moreover, the party has often proved very resilient. In 1906, weak and divided, it was very roughly handled by the electorate and won only 156 seats in a House of Commons of 670, its leader, A.J. Balfour, losing his own constituency of Manchester East and having to arrange the resignation of Alban Gibbs, one of the two MPs for the City of London, to cause a by-election in which he could be returned. Once back in the Commons, Balfour was an indifferent and uncomfortable leader of the opposition, and the Liberal government seemed unconquerable. Yet within five years, there were two more general elections, in January/February and December 1910; at the first, the Conservatives rallied to win 272 seats, only two behind the Liberals who were thence dependent on the Irish Parliamentary Party for a parliamentary majority, and the gap closed to just one at the second, with 272 Liberals to 271 Conservatives. By May 1915, less than a decade after its catastrophic defeat, the Conservative Party was back in office as part of the wartime coalition government.
There was another electoral thrashing in 1945, when under Winston Churchill the Conservatives could only hold 197 seats against a Labour landslide of 393, and again their cause seemed hopeless, the electorate having apparently embraced the new socialism of the welfare state and nationalisation. Again, however, in less than five years the government’s majority was all but wiped out at the February 1950 general election, with Labour mustering 315 MPs to the Conservatives’ 298. Another election in October 1951 put the Conservatives back into government, albeit with a modest majority of 17, and they remained there for 13 years, only losing very narrowly in 1964.
On the other hand, after the Blair landslide of 1997, the Conservatives took a lot longer to recover. They were on their fourth leader by the time they had enough MPs to assemble a coalition with the Liberal Democrats 13 years later, and for a time they seemed to make no progress at all. John Major led them to a crushing defeat and only 165 seats in 1997, and they won only 166 four years later.
I’m an historian and I know how important history is to the way we make sense of the world around us. But it is proof of nothing at all. As the great Rory Sutherland, vice-chairman of Ogilvy UK, always reminds us, the problem with big data is that it all comes from the same place: the past. To put it another way, everything was unprecedented until it happened. So I cannot say that, because the Conservative Party recovered from crushing defeats in 1906 and 1945 surprisingly quickly, it can do so after a potential defeat in 2024. But it might, and the past is at least indicative.
A broad church is not neatly sub-divided
There is an assumption underlying much analysis that the current Conservative Party divides into two major tendencies, the “One Nation” centrists and the populist, anti-immigration right wing. That is a convenient enough thumbnail sketch to use when studying other things, but it does not wholly stand up to detailed scrutiny. At best those are very broad tribes, each with fuzzy edges and a degree of overlap; in truth, if we are looking at the party itself and its likely future direction, it is not really satisfactory.
I wrote early last year that the idea of a “One Nation” group of Conservative MPs, while it is true in a formal sense (there is an organised caucus under that name), is misleading and misinterpreted. The current One Nation Conservatives are defined as much by what they are not as what they are: almost exclusively they were not supporters of Leave in 2016, they are against radical action on immigration like the UK-Rwanda Migration and Economic Development Partnership (although they voted with the government of Second Reading of the Safety of Rwanda (Asylum and Immigration) Act 2024, and they oppose the UK’s withdrawal from the European Convention on Human Rights. More positively, they are perhaps more inclined than some of their colleagues towards public spending and they tend to support so-called progressive social policies.
Such taxonomy is never quite representative. For example, Tom Tugendhat, minister of state for security, is often cited as a “centrist”, but is one of the most hawkish Conservatives on relations with China and supported Liz Truss in 2022 after he himself was eliminated from the leadership contest, while Penny Mordaunt, leader of the House of Commons and another leading “centrist”, was an enthusiastic Brexiteer. None of that is a criticism, of course, merely an indication that clear lines delineating different Tory tribes are neither accurate nor especially helpful.
The so-called right wing is hardly a single, indivisible bloc. Even in terms of formal associations, there are the New Conservatives, a socially conservative group pressing for tighter controls on migration and chaired by Danny Kruger and Miriam Cates; Popular Conservatism, a small-government, low-taxation creed steered by Mark Littlewood under the aegis of former prime minister Liz Truss (like Littlewood, once a Liberal Democrat); the European Research Group (ERG), so influential during Theresa May’s premiership, remains an influence in the party, and was flexing its muscles as recently as last December; the Common Sense Group carries on the socially conservative tradition of the Cornerstone Group; the Conservative Growth Group is another broadly Trussite collective.
These are not exclusive professions of faith, nor do they represent entirely homogenous memberships. For example, Sir John Hayes, chairman of the Common Sense Group, is in favour of strong controls on immigration and a tough law-and-order platform, but is by no means a dedicated free-marketeer or an economic liberal (as he freely admits); he is also president of the New Conservatives. By contrast, Liz Truss herself, while zealous in her support of free-market economics, is a very recent convert to the social conservatism she is now sometimes espousing. Her successor Rishi Sunak is often viewed as a centrist or a technocrat, yet he has persisted with the Rwanda deportation scheme and identified immigration as a major concern for him as long ago as 2015 when he was still only a parliamentary candidate. The point is this: being a member of the Conservative Party’s right wing means different things to different people.
You can’t always find an ideological soul-mate as leader
More than ever before, we have in the past few years tended to assume that MPs will only support a leadership candidate who represents their views in every respect. We are not the only ones: Conservative MPs have fallen into this trap too. It is, I suspect, part of a wider trend in politics to expect absolute ideological purity without any room for manoeuvre, a common phenomenon on the left. But it is absolutely unrealistic.
Earlier this year, I wrote in The Critic that political parties are and absolutely must be broad churches, rather than exclusive sects. This is a matter of basic logic and mathematics. As I said:
If you consider them from first principles, political parties are extraordinary organisations. In a nation of 67 million, it is a huge achievement to maintain two ideological groupings which, between them, can attract the votes of nearly 25½ million people—three-quarters of those who turned out to cast their ballot. Frame it in those terms, and it is obvious that the Conservative Party and the Labour Party will both have to encompass a wide range of views on any given subject.
The same has to be true of leadership candidates if they are to be successful. If you just go through a list of your colleagues and find the one who shares your views on the largest number of issues, then decide that he or she is your favoured candidate, you are effectively saying that nothing else—ability, experience, personality, work ethic, likeability, communications skills, ability to forge a connection with the public—is important, or at least must be wholly secondary. To select a leader on that basis is insane.
We can point to Keith Joseph as an excellent example of this phenomenon. He was a far more thoughtful and intellectual figure than Margaret Thatcher, and far more profound an economic thinker and political philosopher. He was a better and more sophisticated writer, having graduated with a first-class degree in jurisprudence from Magdalen College, Oxford, then being elected a Prize Fellow of All Souls College. It is categorically true, however, as he himself recognised, that he would have been an infinitely worse leader of a political party than Thatcher. He could be indecisive to the point of paralysis, had no sense of how his arguments came across to an electorate much less intellectually absorbed than him and was not an inspiring leader. As a member of the shadow cabinet remarked at the time, “If you chose Keith instead of Heath, it would be like going straight from the fridge to the freezer”.
Yet a dedicated monetarist with generally socially conservative views in 1974/75 would have looked at the emerging candidates to replaced the busted flush of Edward Heath and, if he or she was judging purely on some basis of ideological purity and agreement, would have chosen Joseph over Thatcher every time. That, by any stretch of the imagination, would have been the wrong decision.
The Conservative MPs who consider potential leaders after the election, if events transpire as we expect, will need to consider not only their political philosophies and instincts as well as their specific policy proposals but also their personalities and abilities. Quite simply, they must consider whether the person they decide to support is a good politician, someone able to articulate a Conservative platform and make it attractive to the voters in the future.
They must also have some sense of what kind of leader he or she will be, an element of the job which has too often been overlooked in recent years. Theresa May was elevated to the leadership unopposed yet turned out to be catastrophically short of any kind of leadership qualities: she was unexpressive, remote, formal and reliant on a small circle of advisers, especially her two chiefs of staff, Nick Timothy and Fiona Hill, and it was a major contributing factor in her fall. Boris Johnson was a much more charismatic and superficially inspiring figure but possessed enormous flaws, being disingenuous almost as a deep instinct, disorganised and lazy. Both Truss and Sunak have suffered from restricting their sources of advice to a narrow group of close allies, and neither seems very capable of self-analysis or identifying and learning from mistakes.
Farage is not the future
One proposed narrative, which some Conservative MPs may regard with some enthusiasm, is one in which Nigel Farage, currently leader of Reform UK, is elected to the House of Commons as MP for Clacton, somehow becomes a member of the Conservative Party and is embraced as the party’s new charismatic, finger-on-the-pulse leader. I think this is extremely unlikely on a number of counts.
The first is the sheer logistical prestidigitation which would be required. The Constitution of the Conservative Party makes it absolutely explicit that the party’s leader must be “drawn from those elected to the House of Commons”. For Farage even to be eligible, he would need to change his political affiliation within weeks of being elected on his eighth attempt, which would hardly demonstrate loyalty or gratitude to those who had voted for Reform UK.
It is also important to remember that Farage is not a loyal Conservative driven to a different party by despair. He joined the Conservative Party in 1978, sure enough, when he was only 14, but he left the party in 1992 in protest at the government’s agreement of the Treaty of Maastricht that February. He had also been sufficiently self-detached to have voted for the Green Party at the 1989 European Parliament elections. Bear that in mind: he has not been a member of the Conservative Party for 32 years, more than half his life. In that period, he has been a member of the United Kingdom Independence Party (leading it 2006-06 and 2010-16), the Brexit Party (leader 2018-21) and Reform UK (leader 2021 and 2024 to date), and was a Member of the European Parliament from 1999 to 2020. That means that for all that time he has not only not been a member of the Conservative Party but has actively fought it politically and electorally, which is something that many Conservative representatives, activists and members will not forget.
My hunch is also that Farage will not enter the House of Commons—if he does so at all, which I think is likely but not certain—at the head of a substantial claque of Reform MPs, and will therefore have relatively little leverage over the Conservatives. Reform UK will certainly be influential in the forthcoming election, but, as I said in January in City A.M., it will largely diminish the support for the Conservative Party, further weaken it against Labour and therefore allow Labour both to win seats it might not otherwise have won but to win comfortable seats it might have otherwise snatched only narrowly. Even a much smaller parliamentary Conservative Party is unlikely to bow the knee to Farage and one of two other Reform MPs.
Conclusion (for now)
As I said at the beginning, at this stage I am only setting out some observations which are my informed opinions but only that. Others may take different views but I think the arguments I have set out are logical and defensible. There are still more than two weeks to go until the general election, and, if the previous three weeks are any guide, a lot will happen and much may change. I will no doubt come back to this issue, so I will rely, unusually for me, on John Maynard Keynes, or rather on something he did not actually say. “When the facts change, I change my mind—what do you do, sir?”