And then there were five. The contest to replace Rishi Sunak as leader of the Conservative party has tightened with the elimination of Priti Patel in a ballot of Tory MPs. Robert Jenrick led the pack. The same process will whittle the field down to four next week.
While the race is getting more intense, it shows no sign of engaging the public. Selecting opposition leaders is a niche interest outside Westminster, especially when a former ruling party is reeling from election defeat. Reduced to a rump of 121 MPs, the parliamentary Conservative party is far from power and drained of relevance to the country that recently chose an alternative government.
That is the challenge that the remaining candidates should be confronting. Instead they appear to be operating under the illusion that, as in the past four Tory leadership selections, the winner automatically becomes prime minister. It is normal for prospective leaders to set out policy priorities and boast of achievements (real and imagined), but without candour about the scale and causes of July’s rout the whole exercise looks more like collaborative denial than healthy competition.
When prospective Tory leaders pledge to revive the Rwanda scheme for deporting asylum seekers or declare themselves prepared to pull Britain out of the European convention on human rights, they are advertising their unreadiness to begin the necessary process of political renewal and brand rehabilitation. Even more eloquent on that deficiency is the collective silence on public services, how they came to be in a parlous condition after 14 years of Tory rule and why voters are right to be angry about it.
Naturally, candidates in an election will discuss the topics of most interest to the electorate, and in this case that means appealing to fellow Tory MPs and party members. But there is a familiar trap here for parties newly cast into opposition. Heavy defeat reduces support down to a core that is, by definition, unrepresentative of mainstream opinion. This shrivelled base feels misunderstood by the rest of the country and seeks reassurance from a prospective leader. But satisfying that appetite, leaning into the ideological comfort zone, sends a rebarbative signal to non-aligned voters, making it harder to rebuild wider support.
Time is the traditional remedy. When popularity proves elusive, party stalwarts learn that their pet projects and policy obsessions are not necessarily shared by the rest of the country. The process can be accelerated with astute leadership, but it begins with acknowledgment of the scale of the task. It’s hard to see any of the remaining candidates being able to rise to that challenge, and their party’s prospects of swift electoral recovery are shrinking as a result.
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