By stepping down as Conservative party leader, Rishi Sunak fired the starting gun on the race to replace him. It’s likely to be a long slog for the winner. The contest will run until 2 November, when a new leader will be unveiled just before the US election.
Those applying for the top job must submit their applications by Wednesday evening. Then will come months of campaigning, speechifying and, if fate allows, a star turn at the party conference. MPs will decide who will be the two final candidates. Members will have until Halloween to choose between them. Whoever wins faces a herculean task of reviving the Tories. The party’s general election defeat was the worst in its parliamentary history.
Yet the Tory party is a political phenomenon. It has not just weathered – but dominated – Britain’s turn to modernity since the 20th century began. The Conservatives won 23 of the 33 general elections between 1900 and the present day, and were outright victors in 13 of those contests. Until William Hague, Austen Chamberlain had been the only Tory leader in the party’s history not to become prime minister. Since Mr Hague however, Iain Duncan Smith and Michael Howard earned the dubious distinction of leading the Tories but not into Downing Street. Mr Sunak’s successor will know that they risk joining a club of losers.
The current Conservative predicament is summed up by a saying favoured by the US military: “The enemy is in front of us, the enemy is behind us, the enemy is to the right and to the left of us. They can’t get away this time!”
The Tories are being stretched in one direction by Nigel Farage’s Reform party, which split the right in the last election. This is not new territory. In 2001 the then Conservative leader, Mr Duncan Smith, instructed three MPs to leave the extreme rightwing Monday Club which had called for the voluntary repatriation of immigrants. But the Tories have also lost touch with much of England’s prosperous south, yielding seats to the Liberal Democrats. While the future is unknown, the Tories will have to be able to attack their opponents, like the US marine corps, from all directions, by adopting their rivals’ most popular policies and appealing to their voters. This will require a defter touch than that displayed by any Tory leader since 2016.
The biggest test for the Conservative party, however, will be how far it will adapt to its changed circumstances and acquiesce in Labour’s political agenda. The Tories have rhetorically opposed a greater role for the state, and the philosophy that shaped it, but Labour’s large majority will mean that there is little the Conservative party can do to stop the government enacting its interventionist programme. With one in six of its voters likely to be dead by the next election, the Tory party is unlikely to replace them if it takes an overly ideological approach, given voters’ desire to fix a broken Britain.
Before the Conservatives came to power in 2010, who would have predicted the political culture in which Britain would leave the European Union? Or one that would back movements against immigrants and anti-racism? Or one that incubated sexism inside and outside the Commons? The Conservatives oversaw a rise in poverty as well as the shrinking of the public sector and the shared space that went with it, which gave reactionaries the upper hand. It’s hard to see how the Tories will not reap what they have sown.
