The Caucus Race

The continuing troubles of the Conservative party

Things can only get better. That’s what the Conservatives hoped when they deposed Boris Johnson. His venality, arrogance, untruthfulness and lawlessness had taken him past the point of no return with the public. Surely a fresh face would improve matters?

The last week has shown how dangerous an assumption that was. The only thing that had stayed Conservatives’ hands till now was the complete absence of a credible replacement. A week on, they are no closer to finding one.

A circus carnival of MPs mulled entering the race. 11 actually put their names forward. Eight got the nominations to participate. The fact that eight MPs got 20 nominations shows that the competition lacked an obvious front runner.

Those eight candidates divided into the following groups: experienced and sober (Sunak and Hunt); inexperienced and sober (Tugendhat); experienced and populist (Truss, Zahawi); inexperienced and populist (Badenoch and Braverman); and not very experienced and semi-sober (Mordaunt).

In a competition to become Prime Minister, you would hope and expect that MPs would place weight on experience. After all, the winner has to be ready to lead the country on day one. Yet in the first round the four candidates with experience of great office of state collectively received just a fraction over half the votes available. Two of those four were eliminated immediately.

The picture is even uglier if you look at sobriety. Only just over a third of MPs voted for candidates majoring on the challenges facing government rather than the labelling of toilets and whether Brexit had so far been insufficiently extreme.

So we have learned that Conservative MPs aren’t collectively focused on the need for experience in a leader or on how to deal with the central challenges facing the country. This is unlikely to work out well for the Conservatives.

It gets worse. Much worse. After two rounds of voting there is still no clear front runner. To qualify for the next round, a candidate needs 1/3 of the MPs + 1. No candidate is there yet and none is morally certain to get there either. It seems highly unlikely at present that any candidate will get the support of half of the Parliamentary party. It remains entirely possible that the leading three candidates may, as they did in 2001, end up in a photo finish.

This would be catastrophic for the authority of the incoming leader. He or she would start with the active support of only just over a third of the Parliamentary party. They would have no mandate either from the general electorate or from their peers. Every difficult decision would need fighting for with MPs who would be deeply dubious of their credentials.

The bad news doesn’t stop there. Boris Johnson already caused one frisson last weekend when it was suggested that he was considering stepping down as Prime Minister to fight the leadership election himself. The mere fact that this was impossible under the Conservative party constitution did not stop this idea causing waves. And there have been recurrent leaks all week that he hopes to make a comeback at some point.

Now Boris Johnson may not be able to fight this leadership election. But once it is out of the way, he is not so inhibited. Should the occasion arise in future, he will be able to throw his hat in the ring. He could probably muster the support of enough MPs to trigger a vote of confidence in his successor at a time of his choosing. Given there will be difficult times coming this year, he may not need to wait long to spot a moment to strike.

He is likely to get the pitch rolled for him by the newspapers. Right to the end he retained inexplicably strong support from the Express and the Mail. They don’t seem to have let go of him yet.

Oh, did I mention how the mid-market newspapers have decided to choose candidates? Boris Johnson has let it be known that he wants anyone but Rishi Sunak to win, and the Mail has launched its own Stop Rishi campaign. Both the Mail and the Express have reported heavily the suggestions that Penny Mordaunt has curated her track record energetically and Lord Frost’s comments that she is not up to the job. By default both seem to be promoting Liz Truss.

It is entirely possible that Liz Truss doesn’t make the last two, never mind persuade the Conservative party membership. How will the newspapers react if they are snubbed by the Conservative party? It doesn’t seem particularly likely that they will return to reporting Conservative agendas uncritically.

So there will be a new leader with inadequate support from the Parliamentary party, no mandate from the general electorate, difficult decisions ahead and a predecessor with a grievance stalking them with mass media coverage tailored to his agenda. Not promising, is it?

Right now for the Conservatives, it looks like things are probably going to get worse.