The contest hasn't been dirty (Christopher Furlong/Getty Images)
Of the 15 British Prime Ministers since the end of the Second World War, only two — Attlee and Heath — both initially entered and finally exited Downing Street at a general election. The coronation of Sunak or Truss will make that just two out of 16.
So there is nothing especially unusual about the current leadership election — except, of course, that the Conservative Party is choosing a new leader less than three years after the last one won a general election with close to a landslide. The only other real difference between the current contest and most of the others since 1945 is the involvement of the Conservative Party’s grassroots. The 2019 contest from which Boris Johnson emerged victorious was the first time that any party’s membership had directly chosen a Prime Minister.
This will be the second, and not everyone approves, with calls to restrict the vote to MPs in the future coming from both within and without the party. For some, this is about principle (MPs are accountable to the public, activists aren’t); for others it’s pragmatic (it’ll be quicker, or produce what they see as the right outcome).
Things are not helped by the demographics of the Conservative grassroots — average age around 57, mostly middle-class, disproportionately white and southern — which last time triggered complaints about how the Prime Minister was being chosen by an unaccountable, elderly, Right-wing cabal. (Given the demographics of the Labour Party, when, or if, they are next in power long enough to change leaders while in Downing Street, then their Prime Minister will be chosen by an unaccountable, elderly, Left-wing cabal, but people seem less exercised by this for some reason.)
Perhaps the most surprising thing about this debate is that it has taken so long to become an issue. Labour widened the franchise for its leadership elections to include party members in the early Eighties; the Conservatives did the same in the late Nineties. Yet both changes took place at the beginning of long periods of opposition; that, and two unopposed contests in 2007 (Labour) and 2016 (Conservative), meant that it’s taken almost 40 years for this issue to come to a head.
It was Willie Whitelaw — who stood as party leader, unsuccessfully, in 1975 — who once said that whatever system you have, someone was bound to think it was the wrong one; listening to complaints this week you have to feel he had a point. One of the few academic studies of British leadership contests — albeit one that is now almost 30-years-old — concluded that the rules chosen didn’t actually make much difference to the outcome. For all that parties obsessed about procedures, it was likely that the same people would have been elected in most cases (although the possible exceptions to this claim — including both Thatcher and Corbyn — strike me as important enough to treat that conclusion with some caution).
A central part of the criticism of grassroots involvement is that party activists are said to be more extreme than their MPs. We’re told our representatives are wise and moderate, thinking sagely about the electoral consequences of their actions; activists, on the other hand, are nutjobs, thinking only about ideological purity. If you let activists vote, the argument goes, parties get lumbered with extremist leaders with little appeal to their voter base. But again, one of the few academic studies to actually test this (and here I declare an interest as its co-author) found it wasn’t true. Conservative MPs, for example, are to the Right of their grassroots on economic matters — and the grassroots are closer to the Conservative voters on social matters.
And anyway, the Conservative rules ensure that only two candidates go through to the members’ vote. If one of those is so unsuitable that choosing them would be a disaster, then it’s not the fault of the grassroots. You can’t blame party members that the choice now before them is between someone who always sounds like an over-enthusiastic CBeebies presenter and someone who resembles a malfunctioning animatronic.
Nor do I understand the argument that this contest has been especially dirty, likely to damage the Conservative brand. I’ve lost track of the number of articles about how vicious it has been, a Tory civil war. It all looks relatively civilised to me. I’ve certainly been in much nastier departmental meetings. In 1995, the Redwood campaign put out a leaflet saying that Conservative MPs needed to vote for him “to save your seat, your party, and your country”. Compared to that, this contest is child’s play.
Of course, you can’t blame the candidates in the lead for pulling out of the final TV debates – why risk it? And you can’t blame the opposition for pretending the contest is nasty (unlike Labour leadership contests, of course, which are always a love-in). Ditto journalists, who need to spice up copy a bit (and who are also always lovely to one another; never known for holding grudges). But spare me the Why Won’t Anyone Think About The Conservative Brand stuff. Have you seen the polling on the Conservative brand? The latest Ipsos Mori poll found just 21% of voters thought the Conservatives were “fit to govern” — their worst score since 2011. A bit of robust debate about how to improve things won’t exactly make things worse.
Besides, if the fear is that this will harm the party, the one study I’m aware of found that leadership changes actually tend to increase party popularity. The reasons are pretty obvious: they usually occur when the incumbent is a busted flush, with ratings going south. (He is, they are.) Again, it’s not a universal truth, but it’d be surprising if there wasn’t an electoral honeymoon of some sorts after the new leader comes in.
If polling of party members is any indication — and it almost always is — that person will be Liz Truss. If she is a disaster, the MPs who put her in the top two should carry the can. But if she’s a triumph — and after all, almost everyone assumed Thatcher would be an electoral disaster — then they can share in the glory of a system that worked.
Philip Cowley is professor of politics at Queen Mary University of London. His books include volumes on each of the last three elections.
philipjcowley 
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SubscribeAn excellent article, Has the Tory party and the country been deprived of the leader the country needs and the membership seemed to be moving towards wanting in Kemi Badenoch by the limited choices now presented by the MPs or was their choice the right one leaving Kemi perhaps for a future occasion?
I am torn, having regarded Kemi as an outstanding parliamentarian well before the recent contest, but believing that MPs must inevitably have a better insight into the character and abilities of the contenders than the membership as a whole. Certainly Penny Mordaunts’s deficiencies were highlighted by the events of the public contest when early indications of her popularity with the members threatened to foist an individual with as many flaws and fewer virtues than Boris on the country.
This is the first good sense I’ve read or heard about this contest.
When the last three were asked if they would support another Scottish independence referendum, Sunak and Mordaunt both replied with non committal waffle.
Liz Truss said no.
Straight answer. While being disappointed Kemi Badenoch is out, I warmed a bit to Ms Truss.
Great article. Very well written.
At least Thatcher wasn’t thick.
My guess is neither Rishi Sunak nor Liz Truss will make a very good prime minister. We’ll see what happens.
I agree. If it’s Truss and her Thatcher tribute act you can wave goodbye to the recently acquired Red Wall seats
It will be. She’s got it in the bag.
Vote Conservative, get the New World Order.
Vote (New?) Labour, get the New World Order
Vote LibDem, get the New World Order
Nothing new, it’s been the case for at least two decades
‘Our Democracy’ (TM) is great, innit, plebs?
“You can have it (Ford Model T) in any colour as long as it’s black” – Henry Ford.
I don’t like Sunak, who seems to me to be nothing but another corporate suit. However Truss is a maniac! I shudder at the idea of her representing a Scout group let alone a nation. Is is not possible to find someone reasonably sane?
Reading commentators whose judgement I would be inclined to trust (William Hague, for example), I form a better opinion of Sunak than the ‘corporate suit’. He is a thinking man, a man who listens and learns and, I understand, an honourable man (though we may question how any honourable person could serve so long in a Johnson administration).
Fair points – he has at least got a brain which I’m not sure is the case with Truss
Yes she got all her geography wrong when she met Lavrov.
Henry, your last sentence is the key one for me. It was too hypocritical of Sunak to have supported Johnson so long for me to perceive him as honourable. In addition, he appears to be a puppet of the WEF and I suspect it is intended for him to become PM because he is very pro digital ID. Not good, from my point of view.
Isn’t that Tony Blair’s new project?
This is the very model of an academic blog. It is evidence-led, logically argued and (as others have noted) beautifully written. Thank you, Prof. Cowley.
That said, both main parties do need to revisit their rules for choosing a new leader. Parties in opposition have all the time in the world, but parties in government do not. The 1922 Committee moved things along at a rare clip, but even so, our government is paralysed for two months. That’s never a good idea.
I seem to recall that French inaction to Hitler’s reoccupation of the Rhineland was because Paris was between governments. No one felt in any position to do anything. Does anyone want to bet that nothing of much significance is going to happen between now and early September?
I hear the EU are in support of the Unification of Taiwan to China.
I think what the ‘don’t blame the members’ argument overlooks is that it was the members who selected all the “eccentric” MPs in the first place.
Members probably shouldn’t choose leaders. It would certainly have avoided the unfortunate Corbyn incident. But it is a second order problem next to fact that joining a political party has become a weird quirky thing to do even if you are someone who follows politics. And MPs come predominantly from party membership.
The core problem seems to be culture within big political parties, possibly because they do not attract broad membership, or possibly that is a symptom of something else.
This is the 7th time the tories have run this process. And with the arguable exception of Davis/Cameron it has never managed to present two candidates who were both credible as PM. So something is certainly going wrong.
The modern MP selection process in both parties is tightly controlled by the party management, and like the tory leadership contest, the only possible winner is somebody already carefully vetted.
It ensures the MPs are even more properly representative of the Westminster establishment, rather than the provincial electorate.
It was the huge left-wing change in Labour Members that caused Corbin’s election!
Truss. I’m sure she’s a decent person, but she does seem to be making it up as she goes along
For all his faults only Boris hasthe biottle the belly and the bravura to lead out of the mess a mess largely of his own making.
It is a mess. The job should go to the person who can do it best, not the person who wants it most. Each candidate making up their own policy as they go along renders have a political party with a thought through idealogy pointless. The role of a prime minister is to manage a government not make-up the governments’ policy. We have partisan politics with two principal tribes but then the tribes fragmented into sub-tribes with members dancing about to get their noses in the trough with a ministerial salary on top of their pay as a full time MP. At the end of the day the Queen is going to ask someone who can command a majority in Parliament to form a Goverment. Does the current process get the best person? Or does it get the person most obsessed with being Prime Minister?
The trouble is, not a single one of us knows whether an incumbent Tory leader will make “the best” Prime Minister. There’s only one way to find out, and it’s quite often the case that the chosen one will rise to the challenge and confound their critics, whilst in the process transforming their own persona with the assurance of authority in office. I’d suggest that anyone putting themselves forward would need what i’d consider to be a healthy degree of obsession, aka ambition.
Just a point on PM’s entering and exiting Downing Street after a GE; Harold Wilson did – elected in 1964 and voted out in 1970. That counts doesn’t it, even though he won again in ’74 and resigned in 1976?
LibLabCon only allow potential candidates to even stand as MPs and merely appear on the ballot paper if they are controllable – think ‘Eyes Wide Shut’ style photographs and videos.
The Kemi phenomenon was designed to convince fools that there was still reason to engage in our utterly corrupt & controlled political system – she spoke an excellent game, you see, so people’s hopes were cruelly raised before being quickly dashed again when she was inevitably removed from the game: how can people seriously still believe that her name would still be on the ballot paper by the time the rank and file membership got to vote?? It was NEVER going to happen.
I can’t help but think that the here today, gone tomorrow, Kemi Badenoch phenomenon was just a deliberate attempt to troll the general public – here’s what you could have had, plebs – but hey, you get to vote on whether you get WEF controlled Rishi, or WEF controlled Penny. What does this do to the general public? The answer is that it demoralises them, so they’re easier to manipulate and control. See Yuri Bezmenov for more details. I did a video about this Badenoch kabuki theatre show THE KEMI BADENOCH PHENOMENON: ACCEPT YOU WERE TROLLED, PLEBS, AND ENJOY YOUR ERSATZ DEMOCRACY! – YouTube
I suspect Kemi was rejected because she lacks cabinet experience. Assuming her career prospers, she will be in a much stronger position the next time the leadership is up for grabs.
My concern was that any ambitious Tory wannabe leader would be reluctant to vote for a candidate younger than themself because it would effectively scupper their own prospects. Rishi seemed to be ring fenced from this and I’m sorry to say that Penny probably attracted more attention than she merited because of some rather fetching photographs that appealed to a certain demographic. The one remotely Conservative voice in this unseemly reality show didn’t stand a chance, even though she is of an age with previous, equally inexperienced, Prime Ministers.