July 24, 2024 - 7:00am
The case for going long on the Conservative leadership contest is that time is currently the one resource the party has in relative abundance. There is no doubt about the new government lasting a full parliament, and few people in four or five years’ time will be basing their vote on anything the Tories say in the next few months.
But there’s long and there’s long. Prior to this week’s announcement of the proposed timetable by the 1922 Committee of backbench MPs, most Tories to whom I’d spoken assumed a “long” contest meant the final two candidates — i.e. the two that go to the membership vote — would have a chance to make their case at the Party Conference in the autumn.
Instead, the ’22 has decided to make the conference much more like the “Final Five” stage of The Apprentice. After an August free-for-all, MPs will vote to thin the herd down to four candidates, each of whom will have the opportunity to make their case in Birmingham at the end of September.
Only then will the MPs vote again to winnow it down to the two finalists, at which point CCHQ will take over and run an online ballot of the Conservative membership. This will run throughout October, with the winner announced on 2 November. This structure, which still needs to be signed off by the Party Board, has caught people by surprise — especially the decision to break the MPs round in two.
It obviously makes sense to use the party’s annual gathering to give the two candidates whose names will be going to the membership a chance to make their case directly to rank-and-file Tories. The ’22 could even have staged a French-style head-to-head debate between the remaining pair, exclusively for members, to let them refine their pitches and clarify the choice on the ballot paper.
Instead, members in Birmingham will be canvassed by four hopefuls, two of whom will be culled by the MPs anyway. What’s the point? It’s much less likely that Conference is going to illustrate much about any candidate that their Parliamentary colleagues, who have worked with them day-to-day, don’t already know.
There are other dangers, too. Running this long means the new leadership is not going to be able to showcase itself at Conference — perhaps one of the few occasions when the shattered Conservative Party is guaranteed much media airtime — nor be in position to face Labour when Rachel Reeves delivers her first Budget in the autumn.
Compounding the media problem is the fact that the new leader is going to be announced a mere three days before the American presidential election, which surely nixes any chance of the winner having a media honeymoon and a fleeting chance to set the agenda.
One suspects that quite a few Tory MPs, many of whom were not in Parliament when the party was last in Opposition, have not yet grasped how utterly changed the media landscape is when they’re out of Government. In the next few years the Conservatives are going to have to fight for every scrap of attention; internal meetings of rag-tag groups of backbench MPs will no longer be stories.
Finally, there’s the danger that a long contest has more time to devolve into an unedifying slugfest. In the age of 24-hour news and social media, there is simply no way to stage an internal contest in private. Nobody wants a repeat of the drawn-out bloodletting between Rishi Sunak and Liz Truss in 2022, and from what I hear most of the candidates will strive to avoid it. But the longer it runs, the greater the danger of that discipline breaking down. At least this time fewer people will be tuning in.
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SubscribeThe Conservative Party has become a bed blocker.
I seem to remember the Conservative leadership contest that resulted in Liz Truss going on for months and months, like it was some sort of US presidential campaign, only to end in abject failure. This Tory party doesn’t even know how to go about selecting its own leader without making a pig’s ear of it. What a shower.
Did the leadership contest, that resulted in Liz Truss, go on for months so that the wrong result would be more likely rectified by a Bank of England ambush?
With all the effort being directed into ‘internal discussion’, while the failed status quo reigned supreme, it looked similar to the muddle at the beginning of the Referendum Campaign. And, in both cases, the winners had a dog’s dinner to sort out.
It appears that the current contest is following a similar path. When pointless endurance is valued more than quality argument, when procrastination is manufactured by so few MPs, it looks like the party is going to deliver what it deserves.
So the Party is in danger of not getting enough publicity and, even worse, getting too much publicity!
For a failing political party, not all publicity is good publicity.
There is a long road towards the next major election. Meanwhile, some clarifications are needed. The tory party is on the verge of beinfg sidelined, and needs to understand that “ambiguity” and “retirees uber alles” is not a winning platform.
There is a time for cleaning your dirty laundry, and this time is now.
To have Sunak still stand there as leader of the British Parliamentary Opposition having mistimed the election and blundered through the subsequent campaign…
…not for some time have I seen a better argument for turning the UK into a constitutional republic.
Do you expect a constitutional republic to not have any opposition?
I hope that the ‘Conservative’ Party is finished. Also, I suspect that, after what will prove to be 5 years of unmitigated factional squabbling, by 2029 the equally misnamed ‘Labour’ Party will be finished too.
Suspect the electorate have a taste for blood now so yes – there is every chance labour will be treated just as ruthlessly at the next election as the Tories have been in the latest one.
Would be entirely appropriate (assuming a viable alternative) that both are punished for being jointly responsible for the mess the UK is currently in.
Alot of ingredients have gone into the disaster-zone that is the Tory party and the Right more broadly in British politics.
What is really needed, probably won’t happen but one can hope, is a much more introspective review rather than a beauty pageant. Right wing philosophy is currently racked with contradictions. It can coalesce on wanting much less net migration (don’t we all pretty much) but on much more fundamental economic and social questions it’s needs a full reappraisal of the approach it’s adopted the last 40yrs and some candour and truth on why Brexit has proven to be such an abject failure. It must critically ask itself, why has neo-liberalism led to increasing inequality and a sense of unfairness.
One strongly suspects though it’s gerontology membership, fixated on retaining it’s own advantages, will drag the candidates into yet more cul-de-sacs.