The Tory counter-revolution has begun The party is gambling its future on two radical politicians

The one candidate who broke with this, of course, was Margaret Thatcher, though it is largely forgotten now that she was not the most Right-wing of the candidates in the 1975 leadership election, challenged from the Tory Right by the aristocratic romantic Hugh Fraser who saw in Thatcher just another shade of Heathite grey. Since Thatcher’s defenestration in 1990, the desire for solid conservatism has once again largely held sway — at least among Tory MPs.

In every Tory leadership election from 2001 until Boris Johnson’s victory over Jeremy Hunt in 2019, Conservative MPs as a whole have chosen candidates from the solid Left of the party over the radical Right: Ken Clarke over Iain Duncan Smith in 2001; David Cameron over David Davis in 2005; and, finally, Theresa May over Andrea Leadsom in 2016. Even in the two leadership elections between Thatcher’s victory in 1975 and Boris Johnson’s in 2019, when the candidate of the Left was not backed by a majority of MPs, the winner still offered a form of reassuring continuity: John Major in 1990 and William Hague in 1997. Even after Boris Johnson, the instinct returned with Rishi Sunak beating Liz Truss among MPs in 2022.

There are two crucial lessons to draw from this record. The first is that since William Hague carried out his ill-conceived “modernisation” of the Conservative election rules to give members the final say in the leadership, the party has been beset by a fundamental structural problem. This may fatally undermine the victory in this election.

British parliamentary democracy is governed by the simple rule that whoever controls a majority in parliament is prime minister. In his wisdom, however, William Hague changed the rules so that the Conservative leader can theoretically be someone who does not even command a majority of support among their own MPs. On both occasions when this possibility came to pass, the result was disastrous: Duncan Smith in 2001 and Truss in 2022. This is now a real possibility once again.

The final tally of votes for the three remaining candidates saw Kemi Badenoch receive 42 votes, Robert Jenrick 41 and James Cleverly 37. In effect, each candidate had the support of just a third of the parliamentary party, with two thirds opposed to them — often viscerally. No matter how Cleverly’s supporters break over the coming days and weeks, the decision is no longer theirs, but the membership’s. Based on the conversations I have had with pollsters, Tory MPs and party aides over the past few weeks, there is every chance that Jenrick will now secure enough of Cleverly’s supporters to declare himself the choice of the parliamentary party, only for Badenoch to claim the crown regardless.

Should this happen, irrespective of her attributes, Badenoch will be forced to build her leadership on fundamentally unsafe foundations, a Tory tribune on top of an uneasy parliamentary party. This would be disastrous.

The second lesson is yet more crucial. The only two instances when MPs opted for a Right-wing ultra over a moderate opponent came in moments of perceived national crisis, when the desire for a quiet life was no longer tenable. In 1975, Thatcher was chosen as a counter-revolutionary candidate to put the post-war social-democratic state out of its misery — at least as she and her supporters saw it. The failures of Ted Heath and Harold Wilson, IMF crisis of 1976 and Winter of Discontent of 1978/79 had created a sense of national emergency, requiring a different response from what had come before. In 2019, something similar was true after three years of parliamentary stasis following the EU referendum of 2016. When presented with the choice, the Conservative Party concluded — reluctantly — that radicalism was its only option for survival.

What is so striking about the ballot today is that it appears the Conservative Parliamentary Party has once again concluded that the crisis it and the country faces requires revolution. And so, the two candidates who will now go before members offer different forms of radicalism: Badenoch offers an instinctive form of modern Toryism which rails against the spread of Left-legalism and its catch all partner “wokeism”, whether in the form of equalities legislation, trans-laws or DEI requirements. Jenrick, in contrast, offers a more traditional critique of Britain’s immigration policies with promises of returning sovereignty, though with a contemporary analysis of the failure of the British state. Both are promising forms of counter-revolution, Jenrick’s of the Blairite state and Badenoch’s of the progressive zeitgeist itself.

If either is going to succeed as a truly counter-revolutionary Tory in the image of Thatcher, they will need a good dose of what their opponent is offering and more. Jenrick lacks the Jacobite dash of the true Tory radicals: Bolingbroke, Disraeli, Churchill and Thatcher; Badenoch the broader analytical frame that made Thatcher successful. And what both still lack is the ideological army committed to a cause that any upheaval needs. In 1975, Thatcher had her own think tank, the Centre for Policy Studies, plus the trailblazers that came before, including most notably the Institute for Economic Affairs. Today, it is hard to see the same kind of intellectual energy anywhere in Westminster.

That Conservative MPs have chosen this moment to gamble the party’s future on their harder instinct for counter-revolution has already raised the stakes of British politics for the remainder of this parliament. The exact form of Tory radicalism the Conservative Party membership chooses in three weeks’ time may define British politics for much longer than that.

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Tom McTague is UnHerd’s Political Editor. He is the author of Betting The House: The Inside Story of the 2017 Election.

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