The Conservative Party has just begun the process of selecting its tenth leader since November 1990, when John Major succeeded the defenestrated Margaret Thatcher.
He held on as prime minister in the 1992 general election, although the government’s majority was slashed from 101 to 21; and Major was then serially undermined by a cabal he described as the ‘loons’ before crashing and burning to Tony Blair in 1997.
The run of leaders and results since then says a great deal about the party.
William Hague, Iain Duncan Smith and Michael Howard came and went.
David Cameron did, at least, reverse the losing trend in 2010 (although he didn’t win an overall majority and cut a deal with the Lib Dems).
He surprised the pollsters and pundits in 2015 when he managed to win an overall majority, albeit of just 10; but it was a win earned at the expense of buying off the challenge from Nigel Farage’s Ukip by promising a referendum on EU membership.
The loss of that referendum the following year saw Cameron scuttling from Downing Street within hours of the results being declared.
His replacement, Theresa May – who was never a Brexiteer to begin with – called an election to win a solid, working majority and ended up needing the support of a DUP which, not able to believe its luck, got carried away with its own delusions of grandeur and fell into the trap of believing that the ERG was: a) generally speaking, reasonably sane; b) capable of delivering rational, thought-through strategy; and c) actually gave a particular damn about NI’s position within the UK.
May’s successor, Boris Johnson, did win the largest Conservative majority since 1987, but it was at the price of a nod-and-a-wink arrangement with Nigel Farage’s newest vehicle, the Brexit Party, which pushed the Conservative Party to the populist end of the electoral market – from where it has never won an election before. Worse, Johnson also decided to ignore that majority of his parliamentary party which feared the consequences of a deal with populists.
The Johnson tragedy (he was always bright enough to know the stupidity of his own actions) was followed by the Liz Truss farce (I’ve noted here before that my dead cat would have been a better PM) and the Rishi Sunak comic opera finale (which was always going to end in a Horrible Histories electoral catastrophe).
The party has now reached what is probably best described as its reality TV ‘moment’: forced to pick a leader from a group of survivors who, for the large part, are singly and culpably responsible for the scale of the July 4 disaster.
Before selecting Sunak’s successor, the party has to have a clear understanding of why it lost and to whom it lost.
A few million voters to its right opted for Reform UK (Farage’s third electoral vehicle since 2010), while millions more drifted to its left and centre and opted for Labour and the Lib Dems.
Moving to the right – as Suella Braverman favours – would represent epic stupidity, because Reform and the Conservatives are not and, hopefully, never will be the same party. And moving to the left is not an option, either, because even the party’s generally centrist base is not that way inclined.
Moving to the right – as Suella Braverman favours – would represent epic stupidity. What the party needs is flexibility
What the party needs is flexibility: the ability to shift a little one way and a little the other. That’s how elections are won in a first past the post system and it’s also how second and third preferences are won if the UK moves – as it might – to a PR system. Irrespective of the voting system, though, it’s all about maximising your potential vote: and extremism/populism rarely does that in democracies.
One of the most sensible things I’ve heard from a defeated Conservative was from Robert Buckland: “A bit of silence would be appropriate. That might be a good thing, not just for Suella, but for all colleagues who seem to think they’ve got a very quick and glib solution to what is a mother of all problems.”
He had other advice, too, for Braverman: “If she has a problem then she should trigger a by-election rather than just defecting to Reform UK.”
Personally, anything that gets her out of frontline politics is a good enough option for me.
The Conservatives have a long journey of reinvention and recalibrating ahead of them. They failed to complete it post-Thatcher from 1997-2010. They need to get it right this time.
