This time, however, the compelling questions surrounding the future of the Conservative party in the wake of its worst ever electoral humiliation are at least rivalling those around Sir Keir Starmer’s landslide ascent to Number 10 on the media agenda.
Questions such as Can the Conservative party as we’ve known it survive at all? Can One Nation Tories co-exist any longer with those on the party’s hard right, some of whom seem disturbingly eager to flirt with, or even fully embrace Nigel Farage and Reform?
Who can succeed Rishi Sunak and somehow hold together a bitterly divided party, bereft of the power it feels entitled to, bitterly divided, licking its deep electoral wounds, let alone galvanise it into an effective, credible Opposition to a Labour government with a stonking (if arguably shallow) 174-seat overall majority and the Conservative representation in the Commons reduced to a relative 121 seat rump?
Should the leadership election rules be changed so that only Tory MPs vote on their next leader rather than simply whittling down the field to a final pair, with the party’s dwindling, ageing, increasingly unrepresentative membership delivering the final decision? Early polling on the Conservative Home website and elsewhere indicate the membership wouldn’t at all take kindly to being ‘disenfranchised’. The pros and cons of that also figuring heavily on the letters pages of the Telegraph, Mail and Times pages in particular, along with certain impassioned radio phone-in show debates.
Those same polls suggest Boris Johnson would still be the membership favourite were he to be available, while Kemi Badenoch tops the list of almost certain runners. Most significant of all, however, could be the statistic that around 50% of members would welcome Nigel Farage into the party, possibly as leader while being sympathetic to some form of pact or merger with Reform.
Realignment of the Right?
In the new book ‘General Election 2024: The Media and the Messengers’, my contribution focuses on plots for a ‘Realignment of the Right’ involving allies of both Farage and Boris Johnson, like it or not (and I don’t) still two ‘Big Beasts’ of British politics. Undoubtedly, there are shadowy ‘fixers’ behind the scenes working toward merging the Conservative and Reform parties, in the belief that the Tories landslide defeat and Reform getting almost as many votes for just five seats opens the door to that possibility.
Personally, I’m cynical about any prospect of a Farage / Johnson personal alliance as the pair genuinely loathe each other. Witness Johnson publicly attacking Farage’s ‘mitigation’ for Putin over the Ukraine war during the election last lap, with Farage countering by displaying evidence of Johnson doing similar when he said EU expansionism had been a factor in the Russian leader’s illegal 2014 annexation of Crimea when Boris was leading the 2016 Brexit referendum campaign.
(Declaration of interest: I’ve known Boris over the years and co-authored the less than flattering book, ‘Boris Johnson: Media Creation, Media Clown, Media Casualty’ and I’ve been a regular left wing guest opponent on Farage’s former GB News show where I’ve come to acknowledge his broadcasting and charismatic campaigning skills while despising virtually everything he stands for. Except, perhaps, on the issue of Proportional Representation… the only issue on which Reform, the LibDems, the Greens and much of the Labour party membership agree in principle, although unlikely to unite on calling for it before the next or next but one general election.)
Runners & riders
Over on the One Nation wing of the Tory party right now, it hasn’t helped that potential contenders such as Penny Mordaunt, Grant Shapps, Tobias Ellwood were unceremoniously unseated, while former chancellor Jeremy Hunt, who spent well over £100k of his own money hanging onto his, insists (so far, anyway) that his hat won’t be in the ring. Leaving former ministers Tom Tugendhat and Victoria Atkins and probably former Home Secretary James Cleverley as the early favourites from that flank. In Atkins’ case, it probably hasn’t helped that controversially knighted former deputy prime minister Oliver Dowden – copping almost as much flak as Sunak himself from Tory politicians and Tory newspapers alike for championing the July 4 election date – nominated her as his leadership choice.
On the Conservative Right, there has been no shortage of likely race runners touting their credentials across pro-Conservative print titles and assorted online platforms. Kemi Badenoch, Suella Braverman, Robert Jenrick the early front runners, with others weighing up the odds.
So much so that some newspapers and online platforms are already treating it like a political horse race card, with shifting odds on the runners and riders, form guides and potential handicaps on display in print and online.
For those of us who’ve never voted Tory, but still fancy the notion of a competent, competitive opposition party as democratically desirable, it’s a strange mood of amused mockery and a sense of despair in the wake of July 4.
Amused mockery personified (it went viral) by the vision of Jacob Rees-Mogg conceding defeat in North East Somerset while standing feet away from a candidate sporting a baked bean balaclava and characteristically quoting Caractacus Potts from Ian Fleming’s Chitty Chitty Bang: “From the ashes of disaster grow the roses of success”. It took only a couple of days for the Moggster to publicly back a merger between the Conservative party and his GB News colleague Nigel Farage’s Reform party.
The surprise announcement by GB News that Farage’s show is resuming on a three nights a week basis could trigger a new dispute with regulator Ofcom. It had been expected that, as a serving MP and party leader, Farage would permanently relinquish his GB News gig. It’s believed the channel took legal advice in anticipation of a potential clash with Ofcom and that the Farage show format will slightly change into more of a chat show approach to try and minimise the risk of a showdown with the regulator.
Despair in turn personified by watching the decent One Nation former justice secretary Robert Buckland losing his Swindon seat with another literary quote, this time from the Argentinian author Jorge Luis Borges, comparing the upcoming Tory leadership race to ‘a group of bald men fighting over a comb”, with a 4-letter word dig tossed in about the ‘personal agenda and position jockeying’ he argued had wrecked the party.
Go early, go late?
But while the runners and riders saddle up, there are plenty of political tipsters offering advice on the timing of the race. Rather echoing the dilemma that ultimately unseated a certain Rishi Sunak; to go early or go late? The fate of the Tory party could hinge on it.
Prominent on the ‘don’t rush’ front is former leader and onetime foreign secretary William Hague (William Sage?) who might well have proved a better Tory prime minister than some of those who actually achieved it. In his Times column of July 9, under the headline ‘Farage’s posturing offers no future for Tories’, Hague flashed a warning to right wing frontrunners like Braverman and Jenrick who favour a dance partnership with Farage and Reform.
Opined Hague: “Farage will now be able to spend the next five years undermining and infiltrating the Tories. He will be humorous enough to make them laugh, strident enough to attract their attention, generous enough to take them for a drink in the bar afterwards. To every utterance of the next Tory leader, he will shout ‘weak’ or ‘pathetic’ or ‘get a grip’. Day and night, he will be aiming to show Tory MPs that all they have to do is add his charisma and his 14% of the vote to their 24% of the vote by forming a new party together or letting him become their leader and they will sweep back to power.
“Difficult as it will be, those Tory MPs will have to say; many thanks for the drink, it’s nice to talk, but business is business and the business of our party is not to let you into our minds, into our ranks or dictating our policies from the outside. In doing so, they will have to take the risk that some of their natural supporters remain divided, but the alternative risk, that conservatism in Britain degrades into populism, is greater and most likely fatal.”
Sage words from Hague, echoed by several One Nationers, including James Cleverley in an article for The Times. Echoed too by Kemi Badenoch, albeit influenced by her ambitious attempt to straddle both the right wing and One Nation camps. Not an easy challenge for a politician with a reputation for being able to start a fight in an empty room.
That said, her arch-rival Suella Braverman was busy proving she could start a cross Atlantic furore with an extraordinary attack on both Sunak’s leadership and the LGBT+ community at a far right Trump-worshipping rally in Washington where she described government buildings that fly rainbow flags as ‘occupied territory’. Her X account was in full vitriolic dog whistle flow too.
That particular ‘cat fight’ will continue into the leadership contest, intensifying when Badenoch’s description (at the Tories’ first post-election and much depleted shadow cabinet meeting) of Braverman ‘having a very public nervous breakdown’ was strategically leaked to the media. In some Tory circles, private bets (perfectly legal this time!) are going on Braverman being the next big name Tory to publicly defect to Reform.
It’s a looming leadership race that eventually will, as the starting gate opens and the finishing line is in sight, concentrate the minds of the Mail, Telegraph and Express over who to put their money on. In the Mail’s case’ it will continue to lament Boris Johnson’s ousting as prime minister while affording its highly-paid columnist endless opportunities to accuse Keir Starmer of planning to ‘betray’ Brexit and, ultimately, to rejoin the EU. Good sources tell me Johnson, ambition still burning, is unlikely to publicly back a runner in the Tory leadership race while keeping his powder dry for a grandstanding political comeback bid in 2029 when at 65 he’ll still consider himself a spring chicken compared to his own hero, Churchill.
Meanwhile, the Tory leadership 2.0 psychodrama won’t exactly preoccupy Sir Keir Starmer as he wrestles with pressing matters like saving the NHS, building houses, tackling climate change, upping the defence budget, turbocharging the economy without bowing to the logic of rejoining the Single Market and supporting NATO and Ukraine against the likely threat of a second Trump presidency. Compared to that challenging list, a media preoccupied with the Tory leadership psychodrama might serve as a very welcome diversion indeed.
