It’s been almost six months now since the last Tory leadership contest. So perhaps it was inevitable that another one would be along soon. No, not another attempted Boris Johnson comeback, despite the best efforts of nostalgic grassroots Tories gathering for a rally last weekend in Bournemouth. The contest much of the cabinet is now less than subtly limbering up for is the one that would follow defeat at the next election, and which some Tories think could yet provoke a historic split in the party.
The row currently engulfing Rishi Sunak’s government over immigration can only be properly understood in the context of the electorate some expect to be facing before too long; not the country at large so much as the sliver of it represented by card-carrying Conservative members, many still resentful about having first Johnson and then Liz Truss taken away from them.
For an idea of what those theoretical future hustings might sound like, look to this week’s National Conservatism conference, a gathering of British and American culture warriors brought together by a US thinktank and positioned as a more genteel version of the Republican Tea Party rallies.
The speech by the home secretary, Suella Braverman, set the tone for a movement billed as championing the muscular nation state and traditional nuclear family against the dreaded forces of wokery. Braverman wants it known that she and she alone can give the angriest part of the Tory base what it wants: to yank up the immigration drawbridge at all costs, even if that means leaving farmers’ crops rotting in the fields or decimating universities’ income from foreign students. Kemi Badenoch, the next most blatant frontrunner in the next leadership contest, isn’t due to speak – she’s in Switzerland for trade talks – but her representative on Earth, Michael Gove, will be there and can doubtless fill her in. Other promised speakers include notorious historian David Starkey, last seen on GB News before the coronation accusing Rishi Sunak of not being “fully grounded in our culture”; deputy party chairman Lee “bring back the death penalty” Anderson; and the former Brexit negotiator David Frost.
While they’ll insist they aren’t being disloyal, the overall spirit is ideologically and temperamentally at odds with both Sunak’s coolly technocratic government and the remnants of an older, steady-as-she-goes Conservative tradition that has been on the back foot ever since David Cameron lost his Brexit referendum. (It’s also anathema to younger Tories worried that banging on about the empire, or arguing that working mothers should be helped to stay at home with their children, is electorally toxic to anyone under 40.) No wonder Sunak has decided now may be an opportune time to invite all Conservative MPs to a free buffet in his back garden.
If the National Conservative branding makes this group feel like a party within a party, that’s increasingly what it is. British Conservatism has been an uneasy coalition for a long time now, with the 2016 split between Brexiters and remainers evolving into something more like a split between populists and realists. The former are focused on campaigning, a world where complex questions always have easy answers; the latter are at least attempting to be in the business of governing, with all its awkward tradeoffs. The former tell the Tory base whatever it wants to hear about immigration, insisting that any problems will solve themselves if Britain just trains more HGV drivers. The latter – including chancellor Jeremy Hunt, education secretary Gillian Keegan and Sunak himself – aren’t necessarily bleeding-heart liberals so much as realists, focused on growth.
Barely capable of pulling together in power, it’s hard to imagine them coexisting blissfully amid the bitter acrimony of defeat. The question is whether, in the shellshocked aftermath of such a loss, British National Conservatives could seize control of their party much as the US’s Tea Party zealots did to the Republicans. What’s telling is that what now passes for moderate Conservatism currently lacks both an obvious leadership candidate to stand against them if Sunak falls – though the sword-bearing Penny Mordaunt may be its best bet – and a set of even vaguely buzzy new ideas.
For now, the rival factions remain awkwardly gaffer-taped together by electoral maths. Having seen what happened to colleagues who defected to the short-lived Change UK, despairing moderate Tories understand that any new breakaway party would effectively die an electoral death under first-past-the-post. But some are now privately pinning their hopes on the prospect, however unlikely, of a future Labour minority government being persuaded into electoral reform. Under a PR-type system, a breakaway party could finally become viable. As in any divorce, the question to be answered in a leadership contest would be which side got custody of the house – keeping the established Conservative brand name – and which was deemed the splinter party, forced to move out.
Are National Conservatives the “real” Tories now, or cuckoos still capable of being expelled from the nest? Would Conservative members interpret being beaten by Labour as a sign that they somehow still hadn’t moved far enough right, or as a warning that the country had had enough of populists, thanks? Considering how long it took both the post-1997 Conservatives and post-2010 Labour party to understand why they actually lost, it would be brave to bet on a defeated party in 2024 jumping to the obvious conclusion. Keep an eye on this conference, lest it be the shape of things to come.
Gaby Hinsliff is a Guardian columnist
