Is the Tory leadership contest about to get interesting? That question contains the assumption that you’ve not actually spent all summer glued to the twists and turns of whether Mel Stride is going to overtake Kemi Badenoch in the race to drink from a poisoned chalice. The chances are that most people have probably given more thought to the Lib Dems recently than they have to the Tories. But that could change.
It hasn’t been much of a fight so far. One reason is that the candidates are largely touring the country doing private hustings events with members and talking to local associations. This has the benefit of being behind closed doors – a benefit felt both by the contenders, who can speak more freely, and by the press, who don’t have to listen to the same stock phrase adapted for a Devon and then a Sunderland audience on consecutive days. Another is that the candidates have been banned from attacking one another personally under the new “yellow card” system, which is designed to stop the contest from descending into the sort of public bickering that cost the party the general election.
The problem with the yellow card system is that the Conservatives have become so used to factional infighting and personal rivalries that they’ve forgotten how to argue civilly about policy. They don’t know what to say. Badenoch has continued to channel her energies into attacking other people, largely journalists, who write anything disobliging about her, while the rest are just wobbling about in a confused blancmange of pretending to be nice.
It would be wrong to think that even a three-month leadership contest where people are forced to be civil to each other will be enough to break the habit of years, though. “We are nowhere near the end of our internecine phase,” says one ex-MP. “People still have a lot of dirty laundry to air.” Some of that is personal, with various rivalries between individuals remaining unsettled. Much more of it is down to the fact that the party isn’t sure what it stands for any more. Badenoch, currently the frontrunner, put it well when she launched her own campaign, saying the party had been “unsure of who we were, what we were for and how we could build a new country”. People who are uncomfortable in their own skins tend to be the meanest to others, and the same is true of political parties, which explains why the Conservatives have been so toxic recently.
Not all of the leadership pitches have helped clarify matters. Tom Tugendhat, for instance, is largely running as a centrist, but made the bizarre decision to talk about reforming the European convention on human rights or even leaving it if necessary. That annoyed some of his supporters, who had backed him assuming he was the candidate who wouldn’t take the party further into that territory. It also meant that the ECHR became more of a topic in the contest, which doesn’t help him.
Other candidates have talked a lot about the need to “unite” the party but without much of a plan to do so. Both Priti Patel and James Cleverly are instinctively very loyal to the party and have found the way their colleagues have gone off the rails rather baffling. Patel has found it hard to distance herself from the record of the previous government on big issues such as net migration, while Cleverly is an almost obsessive optimist, who seems to hope that the party will come together after a good pep talk. All those standing have become weirdly hung up on whether they would give a cabinet job to Boris Johnson should he be re-elected to parliament. Robert Jenrick said he would be “delighted” to offer a hypothetical job to a currently highly hypothetical MP. Stride tried to avoid the question entirely, or explaining why he couldn’t just say “yes” or “no”. The reason being that a straightforward answer would risk winding up one half or another of a party that candidates like him want to try to unite by pretending that everyone could just get on if they avoided all the difficult topics, like a family Christmas where everyone watches TV so they don’t end up having a flaming row. But it shows that the party is still stuck in its past, trying to work its way through its old wounds, rather than looking to the future.
This shouldn’t be a huge surprise, given that years after Margaret Thatcher died, there were Tory MPs who got tearful about the way she had been ejected by their colleagues back in 1990. Johnson had a much shorter tenure but he has left a profound mark on the party, not least because to many of his opponents he wasn’t a real Conservative and was part of the drift away from fiscal responsibility, respect for institutions and valuing the family. His supporters, meanwhile, are still convinced that he was the only person who could possibly ever campaign successfully for the Tory party.
If Boris is a question for the past, then the question for the future is surely how does the Conservative party fight off both Reform and the Liberal Democrats without appearing even more sclerotic than it has recently. The contest starting in recess means that Tory MPs haven’t had much time to get used to five Reform MPs bobbing up and down in the Commons – or indeed to quite how small their group feels now it is down to just 121.
When parliament returns and the MPs start to whittle down the six candidates to the four who will make their pitch to the membership at conference, the sparks may start to fly a bit more. But what would really energise the contest would be the prospect that the person who wins actually matters.
Every leader of the opposition matters, in the sense that they have an important constitutional duty to carry out and they will shape the future of their party in one way or another. But many Tories, including sitting MPs who have publicly endorsed a candidate, assume that they are electing the leader before the important leader. This one will soak up more of the infighting, make a few modest reforms here and there, and largely try to stop Labour from creating a powerful narrative about a Conservative “black hole” and economic mismanagement. But the chances of this leader making it to the next election to fight that narrative on the campaign trail are relatively slim, let alone there being much sense that they have a chance of winning that election.
Or, at least, those chances seemed slim when the contest kicked off. It is not guaranteed that Labour will make a success of its time in government, given the financial constraints that will apply until – or if – Rachel Reeves achieves the economic growth that she has staked everything on. Already, the honeymoon period is over, with Keir Starmer’s approval ratings tumbling in the polls. That’s before the autumn budget, which is likely to annoy a lot of voters with more cuts, tax rises and cancelled spending programmes, and spook Labour MPs who are still facing up to the grim reality of being in government and having to choose between two things you don’t like.
The Conservative party has until 31 October to decide on its leader. The budget is on 30 October, by which time most members will have voted. But already Labour is having some wobbles over the winter fuel payment and the two-child benefit limit. If Tory MPs and members start to think that this could be a one-term Labour government where everything goes horribly wrong, then the stakes will suddenly get much higher than electing someone who’ll make a reasonable first stab at opposition. And the candidates will start to think that even if they don’t win this time they might have a better chance next time, just as Rishi Sunak kept going right to the end with his first Tory leadership contest against Liz Truss, because he had a hunch that he might get another go at some point.
That first leadership contest felt so long that most in the Conservative party were adamant that they couldn’t endure another ordeal of any length. Just two years later, though, the party is dragging its way through an even longer one. Given it hasn’t yet worked out how to argue properly, it may take yet another lengthy round of hustings and yellow cards before any of the bad habits of the past few years start to break.
• Isabel Hardman is assistant editor of the Spectator and a presenter of Radio 4’s The Week in Westminster
