The WhatsApp message doing the rounds in Westminster yesterday was succinct: ‘Rishi PM. Hunt CX. Penny FS. And it’s a done deal’. Except that the only thing that’s ‘done’ is the Conservatives as a credible party of government. If there is indeed a stitch-up, one that sees the installation of the beaten leadership candidates as prime minister, chancellor, and foreign secretary, then the Tories can kiss goodbye not only to the next few general elections but also to their very existence as the most successful governing party in the democratic world.
How has the party that swept back into power just three years ago with a massive 80-seat majority so comprehensively trashed its reputation for competent government? How has the world’s oldest election-winning machine, the party of Disraeli, Churchill and Thatcher – not to mention Boris Johnson – transformed itself into a global laughing stock, universally regarded with a mixture of pity, loathing and contempt?
How has the party that swept back into power just three years ago with a massive 80-seat majority so comprehensively trashed its reputation for competent government?
This farce is not about the fast-dissolving political career of Liz Truss; it is the existential struggle for the very survival of the party which has governed Britain for much of the past two centuries. The behaviour of those aspiring to lead the Tories – and the country – has more closely resembled vicious ferrets fighting in a sack than serious people with the interests of the nation at their heart.
Above all, it is the actions of those disgruntled supporters of Rishi Sunak that bear the most scrutiny. These malcontents have never reconciled themselves to the fact that their lofty choice for prime minister did not accord with the preferences of the lowly party members to whom they all owe their jobs. So, arrogantly affronted by Sunak’s defeat in the leadership contest, they set about planning the swift downfall of Truss and the substitution of their chosen Messiah via the back door of an uncontested coronation – this time without the irritating participation of those pesky party members.
Asked about the electoral prospects of Giscard d’Estaing, like Sunak an immensely wealthy figure with a glacially remote relationship to the sorrows and joys of ordinary folk, French President Charles de Gaulle replied: ‘Giscard? His only trouble is the people’.
Similarly, Tory MPs have so lost touch with their own supporters – let alone those millions who are not paid-up Tories – that they are seemingly oblivious to how their pathetic plots look to the people beyond the Westminster bubble. If Truss owes her arrival in 10 Downing Street only to the votes of the 81,326 Tory members who chose her, how democratic will it look if Sunak gets to the same destination thanks to the 60,399 who voted for him? If that is indeed the upshot of the present shady shenanigans at Westminster, then Tory MPs will have invented a novel way of counting election results: loser takes all.
We have to go all the way back to 1965 to find the first time Tory MPs, rather than party grandees, got to pick their party leader in a contested election. The leader they chose, supposedly representing the arrival of the common man in the rarefied upper counsels of Conservative politics, was Edward Heath. Since Heath spent the next decade losing three elections out of four and running the Tory brand into the mire, his selection is hardly a ringing endorsement of the collective wisdom of Conservative MPs. If they succeed in sneaking Sunak in against the wishes of their own party, his elevation is likely to prove equally electorally disastrous.
The woman who replaced him, Margaret Thatcher, was chosen against the better judgment of her own MPs and only proved her worth by passing through devastating crises like the Falklands War, the miners’ strike and the IRA bombing campaign. In the end, she triumphed in each of the three elections she fought before being brought down, not by Labour, but by the betrayal of her own treacherous MPs: a Conservative coup that seems likely to repeat itself today if Truss is defenestrated.
It is quite clear that Truss is no Thatcher. For better or worse she is, however, the leader that the Tory party faithful has freely chosen. If the squabbling rabble on the benches behind her, having already deposed the leader who won them their stonking majority, now destroys her too in the desperate hope of saving their own skins, they will instead ensure their own political extinction. And it will be no one’s fault but their own.
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