If the 1982 Falklands war was what the great Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges called “two bald men fighting over a comb”, how can we describe the present contest for the leadership of the Conservative party? Half a dozen toothless people squabbling over a toothbrush?
Out of some form of perversity or masochism the Tories have made this contest as protracted as possible, with one ballot after another among the remaining rump of the party’s MPs before the last two names go forward to members, such as they are. But even those concerned can’t believe this process is being followed by the nation with rapt attention. If there is such a thing as unrapt inattention, that will be more like it.
Instead of looking at those candidates, whose names escape me for the moment, what of their party? As has often been said and written, this is the most remarkable and successful political party in European history. There has been something called a Tory party in Britain in the three and a half centuries from the reigns of Charles II to Charles III. It was routed three times in the last century, first by the Liberals in 1906. Within a matter of years, during the Ulster crisis of 1912-14 – the lowest point in the party’s history – the Tories were almost inciting civil war and mutiny in the army.
But they were back in office during the first world war and held it for the most of the next 30 years. In 1945 they again suffered a catastrophic defeat, this time at the hands of Labour. When Sir Hartley Shawcross, the Labour attorney general, told the Commons in 1946, “We are the masters at the moment and not only for the moment, but for a very long time to come,” the Tories were enraged by the arrogance of his words, but many of them believed in their hearts that he was right.
He was wrong. The Tories returned to power in 1951 and, maybe to their own surprise as well as to the dismay of the left, they governed for 34 of the last 50 years of the 20th century. They were crushed once more by Labour in 1997 but yet again regrouped until 2010, when a Tory prime minister, in the forgettable form of David Cameron, was back at No 10.
Fourteen years on, it’s not just that last July the Tories suffered their worst defeat since the Reform Act of 1832, which began the gradual process of democratisation: this time it feels different. Alan Duncan retired from parliament in 2019 after nearly three decades as a Conservative MP, holding ministerial office for much of the past decade. His verdict is bleak: “I think the Conservative party is in a far worse state than it was in 1997. It’s intellectually bankrupt; it’s pretty well financially bankrupt; it’s certainly reputationally bankrupt.”
That last was maybe the crucial point. When Theresa May told the Tory conference in 2002 that the Conservatives were in danger of being seen as “the nasty party”, it was a misprision. No one had ever voted for the Tories because they were “nice”. Their selling proposition was competence, and that has now been utterly lost, to a point where it may be very difficult ever to recover it.
One can point to proximate explanations. Brexit seemed a great triumph for the Tory right, but its fruits have proved very sour, apart from the way it justified the saying that referendums are a “device of dictators and demagogues”. That was Margaret Thatcher in 1975, and how right she was. We don’t yet have any dictators in this country, but the Brexit referendum was an exercise in pure demagogy.
To return, unenthusiastically, to this leadership contest, it demonstrates in itself the Tories’ plight. When Edward Heath was the first Tory leader to be elected by the parliamentary party in 1965, 150 MPs voted for him; when Thatcher deposed him in 1975, 146 voted for her; and when in 1995 John Major as prime minister resigned the party leadership as a challenge to his rightwing antagonists, 218 MPs voted for him.
In the first round of voting last Wednesday, Robert Jenrick led the poll with all of 28 votes, while Priti Patel was eliminated. But really, what a crew. Jenrick, Kemi Badenoch, James Cleverly, Tom Tugendhat, Mel Stride … there’s been nothing like it since the “Who? Who?” cabinet of 1852, so called because when the list of obscure names was read out to the aged and deaf Duke of Wellington, he kept asking, “Who? Who?” And if the names of these candidates seem equally obscure, it doesn’t really matter, since it seems extremely unlikely that whoever wins will ever be prime minister.
When this bedraggled band of Tory MPs whittles the number of candidates down to two before the party conference begins on 29 September, a last choice is made by the members. To which one might respond: what members, and what party? In the early 1950s, the Conservative and Unionist party had 2.8 million members, and was one of the great popular political movements in Europe. Not surprisingly the Tories are coy about the present figure of membership, but it appears to be about 170,000. This is a party heading for extinction.
Behind the squabbling candidates loom two figures.
The publication of Boris Johnson’s memoir next month will be a reminder of his lurid career, his support for leave in the referendum based purely on calculation of personal advantage, his capture of the prime ministership in 2019, his hubristic purge of most of the more honourable and decent Tory MPs, his election victory, and then the dramatic and entirely predictable downfall that followed.
And then there is Nigel Farage, who has haunted the Tories for so long. He has finally won a parliamentary seat himself, along with four other Reform MPs, but that understates, as it has for years, his threat to the Tories. The 12.6% of the popular vote that Ukip, the previous iteration of Faragism, won at the 2015 election was an augury of the following year’s Brexit vote, and last July Reform won 14.6% of the vote and five seats.
Already there are voices in the increasingly hysterical Daily Telegraph saying that Farage is the real leader of the Tory party, and a clamour for an alliance between the two parties. The Tories should beware. One aspect of their traditional ruthlessness and hunger for power has been their capacity for absorbing or cannibalising other parties, the Liberal Unionists from the 1880s, the Coalition Liberals in the 1920s and the National Liberals in the 1930s, with the Tories always dominant.
Any hint of joining Reform would plainly be a reverse takeover, with Farage as the senior partner, and would be the final death knell for the Conservatives as they have for so long survived and prospered. At the very least, candidates for the Tory leadership, however forlorn they look, should say that.
Geoffrey Wheatcroft is a journalist and author. His books include Yo, Blair! and the Strange Death of Tory England
