A Fate Worse Than Death

The Conservatives have more to worry about than just the next election

Imagine if Boris Johnson were still in Parliament. Rishi Sunak’s personal ratings are atrocious. The PM would probably be facing a challenge in the next couple of weeks (the moment his year’s grace after his election as party leader was up) and there would be hourly anonymous briefings to that effect to the Mail and the Telegraph. The Privileges Committee did Rishi Sunak an enormous favour, giving him a huge injection of authority that he previously lacked.

Rishi Sunak is using that authority to implement his plan for fighting the next election. The chances of that plan succeeding do not look good right now. The Conservatives are roughly 18% behind Labour in the polls and the gap hasn’t apparently changed much all year. Time is running out for him to change that.

Party leaders and their parties do not have the same interests. Obviously, or leaders would never be replaced against their will. Still, political parties by and large fall in behind their leaders, until they don’t. They have to let their leaders lead.

There comes a point, however, where the conflict of interest is too stark. Conservatives will soon need to consider whether they’re reaching that point with Rishi Sunak.

Rishi Sunak has the simple interest of maximising his chances of staying in power as long as possible. From his viewpoint, low odds gambits are worth taking, regardless of the risks, so long as they improve even fractionally his chances of achieving that goal.

The Conservative Party can afford to take high risk gambits so long as they have either a reasonable chance of succeeding or they don’t risk separate damage to the party’s long term interests. High risk gambits with poor chances of success and high chances of substantial damage to the party’s long term interests are a different matter entirely.

The Conservatives’ polling position remains dire. Worse, one of their previous best assets, Rishi Sunak’s personal reputation with the public, has decayed to dust. If the party were in charge, it might now seriously be thinking about how best to minimise the long term damage rather than taking speculative gambles to win. But it isn’t.

This should really worry thoughtful Conservatives. There are worse things than simply losing.

Labour lost in 1979 — not too badly really — but the narrative of the winter of discontent has fed generations of Conservative messaging about a comprehensive Labour failure. In 1997, the Conservative lost power with a narrative that Labour still tell of sleaze, incompetence and exhaustion. In 2010, the Conservatives were gifted a narrative by Liam Byrne that there was no money left. It is being used to this day.

Rishi Sunak is now pulling every lever in front of him, frantically trying to turn the polling round. He looks as if he’s simply making the narrative worse. Labour are already successfully branding the Conservatives incompetent, dishonest and sleazy. With his proposals on Net Zero and motoring, Rishi Sunak is gifting Labour an additional message that the Conservatives are willing to wreck the country and the planet in a desperate attempt to keep power. The Conservatives risk looking like being irredeemably the party of the past.

The Conservative Party, like Tsarist Russia, is an autocracy tempered by assassinations. If the Conservative Party collectively formed the view that Rishi Sunak is risking their future they could oust him.

In practice they probably won’t. The only replacement they’d have a hope of the public listening to now would be someone with unimpeachable credentials for the job from long experience at the highest level. The immediate obvious options for that are Jeremy Hunt, Michael Gove and Theresa May. One of these could only be installed by something close to popular acclamation by the party’s MPs. That is not going to happen: all three have numerous determined opponents and the prospects of a vacancy arising in the near future without Suella Braverman putting her name forward must be asymptotically approaching zero. So the realistic choice is between carrying on with Rishi Sunak or, after another divisive leadership contest that will make them look still more ridiculous, appointing yet another perceived lightweight who has no chance of getting a fair hearing from the public now. They’ll probably carry on.

Can the Prime Minister be reined in? If he reasons along the lines I just have, no. He’ll call the bluff of any men in grey suits who come toting whisky and revolvers. I doubt he’s planning to hang around if he loses the election. Let them do their worst after that.

If Brexit should have taught Conservative MPs anything it’s that for a negotiation they need to have a BATNA, a best alternative to a negotiated agreement. So the grandees are going to need to have a plan if Rishi Sunak faces them down.

One possibility is to find an alternative heavyweight who could act as a unity candidate. The problem with that comes down to personalities and track record. Second tier candidates might include David Davis, Sajid Javid, James Cleverly, Ben Wallace and Priti Patel. But some of these have already announced that they’re standing down and none really seem to have the stature. They don’t, or don’t yet, seem PMpabile. Suella Braverman is going to stand anyway. And so far MPs seem more resigned than restless. This doesn’t look like a serious option.

Another tack would be to threaten to kill any legislation in contentious areas. If there are enough Conservative MPs on board, this would be an effective threat. However, that depends on there being legislation proposed to implement a policy. Some policies, such as cancelling much of HS2, need no legislation. Governments can do a lot of administration without needing Parliament’s approval (Charles I managed a decade without Parliament’s supervision and he isn’t thought of as a faintheart).

So I think the Conservatives are stuck. Rishi Sunak is creating a narrative of erratic faux-populism for this government: the party of the past. If, as looks very likely, the Conservatives lose, this is going to be hung around their necks for years to come. These last few months of this clapped-out government could have been used to steady the ship so that the Conservative party could limp into harbour and be refitted in fairly short order. Instead, the captain is steering it straight into an iceberg. Time to start bagging spaces on the lifeboats.