What would happen then? Could the Conservatives continue to accommodate both No Deal Brexiteers and Remainers intent on thwarting the central policy of the Conservative Government? Electorally, could the party even pretend to be a vehicle large enough to carry both Leave voters and Remainers?
When senior and sensible Remain Tories such as Nicky Morgan1 are already talking about the possibility of a national unity government, it is surely fair to speculate that the current party boundaries would be stretched to breaking point by the sort of outcomes that might follow on from the installation of a No Deal Tory as Prime Minister.
It is, bluntly, hard to see how all of the Conservative Party’s current MPs could remain in a party that formally dedicated itself to the Leave cause and the Leave-minded electorate. It is also hard to see how that party could retain all of the seats it currently holds in the Commons. The evidence is a bit unclear, but around a quarter of all Tory seats had a Remain majority at the referendum. (See Chris Hanratty’s work for more.)
That than, is the choice that the Conservatives are making when pondering Mrs May’s fate: do they wish to go on trying to contain that Remain/Leave divide, or do they wish to clearly take a side, in so doing possibly embrace a formal split and a fundamental shift in their political offer, abandoning southern, urban Remain-voting seats and electors, in order to target only Leavers?
If the Tories followed that path, what would happen to Labour? That party is also currently attempting to straddle the Remain/Leave divide, a position which is looking harder and hard to maintain as we near the scheduled date of exit. Maintaining that position could become harder still.
Just as it is possible to imagine the Conservatives becoming a full-blown Leave Party and shedding its Remain supporting members and voters, it is possible to imagine an all-out Remain Party emerging from today’s Labour Party: the Venn diagram overlap between critics of Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership and backers of the Remain cause is very high. And private conversations with members of that group and with Remain-minded Tories raise the strong suspicion that they have more in common with each other than with their party colleagues who take a different view of Brexit.
So far, the two-party system and the two parties themselves have proved remarkably resilient even in the face of the electoral forces embodied in the referendum vote and the politics of the years that followed. But the pressure on that system and those parties is far from over. It is surely possible that some sort of realignment around that Remain/Leave cleavage will yet result from the referendum.
Britain’s electoral system tends to discourage any development of this sort, unless votes are concentrated in a given geographical area. But that is just the case here. The Remain vote is quite concentrated in largely urban seats, so a new pure Remain party might be able to win seats in its own right, while ToryLeave and LabourLeave carved up the other 2/3rds of seats.
Alternatively, the old parties could go on trying to muddle through, trying to define politics and political choices about something other than Remain vs Leave – or at least, trying to dissolve that division into a compromise that leaves no one entirely satisfied, just as the British political system has largely succeeded in doing for the last century or so.
That, then, is the magnitude of the choice Tory MPs take in their decision on Mrs May’s fate: try again to make the old model work, or smash the system in the hope of building something better from the fragments. And whatever the arguments that might be made for the latter course, it is hard to see how that could be described as the conservative choice.
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