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August 19, 2024 - 7:00am
So far this August, we’ve had nationwide riots, the world’s wealthiest person starting a flame war with the Prime Minister, and a nuclear power being invaded. So it’s perhaps unsurprising that the Tory leadership race has taken a back seat.
And yet it is happening — and does matter. Get things “right” and the Conservatives could be a party of government once more in the medium term. Get them wrong and they will be replaced by Reform UK. A phalanx of Faragist hoplites marching into the Commons after 2028 is already plausible. Another dud leader would make it a rout of the Tory benches.
The favourites are Robert Jenrick and Kemi Badenoch. Though with the party’s MPs — now primarily on the centre-right — only submitting two candidates to the membership, it is likely that Tom Tugendhat will make the run-off against one of them. If recent history is a guide he will likely lose. What’s more, recent polling among Conservative Home readers has him sitting on just 10%.
I can’t understand Tugendhat’s appeal in the slightest. On domestic politics he has virtually nothing coherent to say, while on international affairs he generally repeats platitudes or whatever the Atlanticist think tanks are saying. But there’s something else I can’t shake: if that’s what moderate Tories are into, then why not Jeremy Hunt?
Hunt is evidently a decent campaigner. After all, his seat of Godalming and Ash is the only target the Liberal Democrats failed to win in July. Chichester, that Tory citadel for a century, fell last month — as did much of the Gails Front. But Hunt’s Surrey seat proved a hardy redoubt. For Labour he would be the biggest concern as Tory Party leader, particularly if he could surround himself with serious people and craft a distinct political message. Not likely, but also not impossible.
Look at where the lowest hanging fruit is on the electoral map. Last month, along the now battered “Blue Wall”, 38 previously Conservative constituencies voted Liberal Democrat. Yes, the most popular party for deserting Tories was Reform, but looking at the seats the Conservatives just lost — and are most likely to regain — it’s a different story. Places such as Eastbourne and Horsham are as Tory as it gets — not to mention West Dorset, which had continuously voted Conservative since 1885. Similar seats include South Devon, Woking, Guildford and St Ives, while Labour picked up Worthing, both Bournemouth constituencies and Basingstoke. The ideal Tory prototype to appeal to voters in such places would undoubtedly look and sound like Jeremy Hunt.
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SubscribeJeremy Hunt would never leave the ECHR, so would fail to re-unite the Tory party with the voters that have dumped it.
Being a product of Charter”heouse” is quite enough to rule the swivell eyed non-entity out of running anything other than a bath or commanding a view ( as it happens a comment once levelled at me by that great Coldstreamer ” Perry” Mason)
This comment is just childish. And you can’t be both swivel-eyed ( in the usual political meaning of that term i.e a crazed ideologue) AND a non-entity at the same time!!
Hmmm. He’s not exactly a lion, is he?
He’s just another “Mr Blobby”
I look forward to watching the march of the Reform hoplites in 4yrs and 9months…
May 2025 should prove interesting. Trees need roots – Reform has to start meaningfully winning locals to create networks and infrastructure i think Yousef and Tice are up to that job
Really? Tice?? On what evidence, I wonder.
I am not sure. There is something light flaky showbizzy about Reform. They won as many Tory Fury protest voters as pure new Reformers – after 14 years of Quasi Socialism and Rule by Blob, it was just too easy and required no party apparatus. I cannot see Farage overseeing the hard graft of building another big new party. The new Tories have to park their tanks on the core immigration, DEI and pro enterprise policies. Only if Suella and a few other big names defects can I see them evolving into a permanent force. There is no way the Right can fight and devour each other ever again. Too much at stake. They must both be ready for electoral alliance in 2030.
Won’t make much difference if the country’s going in another direction.
You think the electorate are going to push for more of this?? Two Tier Policing and Justice against a background of lawlessness? Doctors and GPs squeezing us dry while their 1940s system crashes?? Cold pensioners?? Millions of strivers still unable to afford a house or energy bills in a few short years while the border stays open to all? The business sector and middle classes after the tax horsewhipping such kulaks deserve??? No no. They have chosen the path of class conflict and anti growth. Their direction is right into the wall. Only one way is possible after such toxoc destructive ideological war.
The petit bourgeois kingdom of Draconia
I’m a Southern ex-Tory who voted for Reform. Badenoch or Jenrick I could understand. How on earth would Hunt get me to switch back to the Tories??!?
He wouldn’t. Aaron is attempting a PsyOp in enemy territory here. It would be like Rory Stuart writing for Labourlist, recommending that Lammy would be the best replacement leader when Starmer goes south.
Sorry to be rude – but could this be rewritten other than in knowall politico-babble speak? I have absolutely no idea what you’re talking about.
No need to apologise.
I recommend you take this course.
https://www.soas.ac.uk/swahili-language-courses
Comprehension will improve thereafter.
We wouldn’t want you back, your politics are completely alien (no pun intended) to conservativism.
Who is “we” and why do you think that you can speak for anyone else?
I think Chris probably speaks for the Tory CINO rump.
On the contrary, they _are_ conservatism. The Conservative Party has not been remotely conservative for several years now.
Exactly.
Well Chris, I was also a Tory Voter for 42 years and an occasional party member.
What level of arrogance leads you to believe that you know what Conservatism is and what its value are?
This year I voted Reform – along with 4 million others – mostly people leaving the Tory Party.
I will keep voting Reform or other until the Tory Party re-discovers what Conservatism actually is.
With respect from America, Chris has a point, the Tories might as well evaporate into the mist never to return. Let conservatives find, build a new party — through Reform perhaps but let the Tory party die, it is too far gone.
Chris Riches, it sounds like you’re about as conservative as Tony Blair. If you’re ‘we’ is the Tory party, you might as well merge with Labour and have done with it. Reform is the only Conservative Party…..and even Farage is too liberal on some issues (Thatcherite Neo-liberal economics; too open to free movement of capital; insufficiently Christian/pro-religion; insufficiently pro-family)….but my gosh he would be a step in the right direction. Colour blind, civic national, socially conservative, familial, community centred, distributist, Christian (or at least judeo-christian), libertarian for families, skeptical of corporations, anglophone-centric….distributist economics, small family business….much much smaller state – that is the conservative direction of travel. And you want none of it. Good riddance. And by the way, any candidate who won’t guarantee to leave ECHR will be dead in the water anyway…although that won’t save them, because they had a decade to do this…….It has been obvious every second of those Tory administrations that this was an absolute necessity. So why would be trust Badenoch now? If she’s serious, she should join Reform; or do a deal and stand down in Red Wall seats so that Farage can take them out.
Kemi Badenoch is plain speaking and pragmatic. She would be popular with the ‘Red Wall’ voters who want solutions to their problems. I’ve never voted Tory in my life but if she was to become leader, I would vote for her in a heartbeat.
Quite so. She’s also a black woman who thinks for herself, which would cause hilarious conniptions among the Clive Lewis/Dawn Butler idiot-left tendency.
I like Kemi too, but to my knowledge, Jenrick is the only one who has called out net-zero for the insanity it is (my biggest bug-bear), and suggesting we should go hell for leather for nuclear.
Although if Net Zero is “insanity”, why would we be going hell for leather for an extremely expensive form of energy, as it has always proved?
This is another BS gas lighting exercise
Very likely true.
Errr.. yes I probably agree with your politics but this is quite obvious isn’t it? Many more people voted for the Liberal Democrats and reform in the southern Blue Wall seats. And many of them detest Reform and Farage, weather we think this is justified or not.
I wonder if it might be possible on this forum to understand that not everybody – even sometimes a majority! – agrees with our point of view.
I think we’re being gaslit here. Far from fearing Hunt I suspect Labour would choose him as their opponent if they could. As would Reform. The time for his kind of all-things-to-all-men politics is past.
Competency vs the inadequacy not only of Starmer but Ms Reeves who is owned not just by the Eurofederal cause but by the unions too. Pay deals forcing inflation and interest rates up again? Easy pickings.
However, he might be happy where he is while Jenrick campaigns on a strong anti-immigration platform.
In Hunt’s favour, Reeves in making him look like a genius!
??? Baggage???? Hunt personifies the Cameroony lib demmy wet faction that outraged and lost millions of Tory voters!!! A nice guy Remainer, he not doubt was hostile to any push against illegal immigration or DEI extremism. The NHS was immune to any reform by him. Worse as Chancellor he acted like a radical Brownite with socialist redistributive policies like the Windfall taxes on North Sea and using the sneary phrase ‘unearned income’ as he whacked SMEs and investors. He and Rishi utterly torched the idea that the Tories were the party of aspiration and business and just bent the knee to the useless Treasury goons who had gone mad in lockdown. Then he and Rishi just ran away early before even attempting to protect us from the Seventies Starmerite horror show by for example, abolishing inheritance tax.
Hunt is ‘party of Davos’ personified and really no different from Starmer.
Whilst people call for competency, in the prolongued absence of same my sense is that the public mood has moved on favouring strength. The person prepared to rip up the statute books is going to be favoured over the person who can create it for good effect. Environent increasingly febrile since lockdowns …..
That’s what Starmer appears to think Or at least where he’s gone.
The general point holds – the Tory membership will not leave the party with someone who’s going to win back the seats they need. The Reform leaning types will rattle around in an echo chamber not grasping that direction is a cul-de-sac.
Don’t think you’ve quite understood what is happening – not just here, but across the West. With a lot of help from the political class, which has been systematically ignoring the electorate’s wishes for twenty years, the Internet has made representative democracy obsolete. The choice we face now will be between direct democracy and dictatorship. Obviously the left will choose dictatorship. Hopefully you’ll be defeated and we’ll finally get the real thing.
Direct how?
I’ve seen a number of renct articles at the Guardian and other places written by lefties like Bastani arguing who should be the next Conserative leader and what direction the party should go in. I think it’s safe to say the Tory party should do the exact opposite of what they recommend, which is to make the Conseratives unelectable for ever, or keep them on the left of politics so the voters can only choose between hard left Labour and centre left Conservative. The Guardian and, I presume, Bastani, would love it if the three main parties were all on the Left, meaning the British electorate never gets a realistic chance of a right-wing government in a FPTP system.
The Tory party has no future as an ersatz socialist party.
There are an awful lot of assumptions in your comments. The unfortunate reality is that the Tory Party probably does not have much of a future at all, but even more so, there is actually no majority for a strong right-wing party in this country, any more than there is for a strong left wing one (ie Corbyn), the fantasies of various UnHerd commenters just aside.
A Social Democrat Party that actually reduced immigration such as in Denmark would probably be extremely popular.
Such a party would undoubtedly be described by the media as right-wing though, and quite probably as far-right or “hard-right”, regardless of its wider policy platform.
Hunt and his like were the reason why the Conservatives did so badly in the election.
People want to vote for a Conservative, not a Whig.
But as we see in the remarks here, no one can agree what a Conservative is anymore. A bunch of oddly assorted obsessives is neither party, a position or a movement.
It’s Brexit that broke it when those who wanted the state out of their way betrayed those who wanted more done for them. And BoJo, who was supposed to hold things together, big dogged anyone and anything who could possibly naysay him. Now, take back control is in the hands of others. You need to hope they drop the ball. Or kick it into touch.
I think by this you mean by this that YOU want to vote for a right wing candidate, rather than a liberal! Which is fair enough but you are not “the people”!
Only someone who has never had any involvement in an actual political campaign could write something this dumb.
Why would UnHerd publish this nonsense from someone that is clearly a Labour stooge?
He vastly reduced bed capacity in the NHS during his tenure as Health Secretary, then led an investigation into the goings on during the COVID fiasco. It was the same farce as when Tony Blair was appointed as a Middle East Peace Envoy after taking us into a war with Iraq. You couldn’t make it up!
Hunt’s ‘competence’ includes being the first Health Secretary to succeed in provoking a doctors’ strike. Well done.
There’s wishful thinking and then there’s this. Gave me a laugh on a Monday lunchtime anyway, thanks Aaron!
No point in competence if you’re a small state junkie. It’s a road to nowhere.
I clicked the link to Conservative Home to see the recent leader polling and made the mistake of going through the comments.
Conservative Home doesn’t seem like a home for conservatives, very much like the Conservative Party. Moving further and further to the left, to try and appeal to Labour and Lib Dem voters, is a fool’s errand.
Say what you want about Boris. He was a completely hopeless PM but a masterful politician. “The facts of life are conservative” and he appealed to those instincts in people, across the land. Somewhat the same as Farage but more good humoured and less abrasive.
Nonetheless, that is the only direction of travel for the Conservative Party.
April 1st have come round quickly?
Hunt did nothing good as a long time ineffectual Health Secretary and a great deal of damage as a clueless Chancellor. He would be Labour’s dream leader of the Conservatives and be totally incapable of reuniting the right of centre vote in this country and hence give the Socialists a free pass to continued power. But if you are a Labour Party voter it’s a super idea!
As Health Secretary, he failed to reform a poorly performing system which continues to get worse as more money is poured into it. What did he do there? As Chancellor he produced a disastrous budget, removing all the gains on corporation tax, producing the highest tax burden ever and increasing already bloated welfare payments by 11.7%. He is a walking failure – no wonder the lefties want him as leader!
Yes, avowed Marxist telling us to support Hunt for Tory leader.
Guy who was in “Conservative” cabinet for how many years?
Who did nothing to reform NHS.
Who did nothing to stop mass immigration.
Idea that he will appeal to Reform voters, which Tories need to regain to even think of governing again, is just mad.
Southern former Tories will be back anyway, after Labour delivers destruction of this country.
As they always do.
Can someone please explain to me how Jeremy Hunt is even allowed near Govt let alone in it. Isn’t your wife being a senior and active member of the Chinese Communist Party a security threat beyond belief?
It seems unlikely either that Conservative MPs or that Conservative Party members will be minded to pay any attention to the supposed views of Mr Bastani.
I wonder if Kemi Badenoch’s husband is a descendant of Alexander Stewart, the Wolf of Badenoch. Said Wolf was a proper scrapper.