There comes a time in the life of any government where it dawns on everyone that the ship is going under.
And so begins a scramble for the lifeboats. A trickle of MPs wanting to stand down at the next election swells to a flood, all hoping to beat the post-election rush for jobs on the outside. Others plead to be airlifted to the safety of the House of Lords. Yet even as the rats start fleeing the proverbial, it often pays to watch for hardier souls swimming seemingly inexplicably towards it.
Two of the more influential Conservative minds of recent times have just been selected to stand for parliament in what would normally be safe seats, though nowhere is as safe as it was. In their respective heydays, George Osborne’s former right-hand man Rupert Harrison and Theresa May’s former consigliere Nick Timothy wielded more power than most ministers, and certainly more than they’ll enjoy in what looks likely to be opposition. The former is a remain-voting old Etonian and gifted economist, once nicknamed the “real chancellor”; the latter a factory supervisor’s leave-supporting son from Birmingham who, by convincing his boss to focus on left-behind towns and people anxious about the pace of change, helped pave the way to toppling the so-called “red wall”. Both could probably enjoy nicer lives outside parliament – Harrison in the City, Timothy writing his Daily Telegraph column – yet they’re queuing to board the Titanic. It seems the opposite of a career move. But, like soldiers enlisting under the shadow of war, both are choosing to be part of a coming battle for the Conservative party’s future, which will shape not only its long-term prospects but arguably Labour’s, too.
Wherever Tories have huddled together this summer, from end-of-term drinks receptions to rain-sodden Cornish beaches, talk has turned to life after defeat. Few expect Rishi Sunak to turn things around now, and even moderates who initially saw in him a return to sanity have been dismayed by recent wobbles on issues like net zero. Inflation may finally have peaked, but at a heavy cost; when the Bank of England hiked interest rates again last week, it warned that they may have to stay high for at least two years. That suggests that homeowners coming off fixed-rate mortgage deals will be taking painful hits all the way up to polling day, a grisly backdrop against which to fight an election. Backbench fears about a fabulously wealthy prime minister looking oblivious to the public’s pain, meanwhile, were not eased when Sunak followed this news by hot-footing it off on holiday to California, where the family has a penthouse in Santa Monica.
Having more or less resigned themselves to a wipeout, much of the Conservative party has therefore moved on to speculating with its customary gloomy relish about who might survive to pick up the pieces afterwards.
The Tory right looks well dug in for a post-election leadership contest, with the business and trade secretary, Kemi Badenoch, and home secretary, Suella Braverman, likely contenders. It’s less obvious who the remnants of the centre-right One Nation tendency might rally round. Penny Mordaunt could run again, but isn’t even guaranteed to hold her own Portsmouth North seat. Coming up on the rails are the foreign secretary, James Cleverly – the great survivor who has ingeniously made himself useful to every post-Brexit leader, even if nobody is entirely sure what he stands for – and the education secretary, Gillian Keegan, whose tale of working her way up from 16-year-old factory apprentice to successful businesswoman stirs Tory imaginations.
But whoever the candidate, their first task will be winning the coming argument about why the Tories lost.
Not everyone is yet convinced they will, especially on the Labour side, which still bears the scars of being disappointed once too often. But let’s assume for now that polls, byelection results and signs of panic in a governing party are all reliable weathervanes. In the bitter recriminations that would follow a thumping defeat, the new Conservative intake of 2024 would be a small but potentially influential voice, untainted by the mistakes of office and bursting with frustration at the mess their predecessors have made of things.
The postmortem won’t simply pit right against left, or leave against remain. An inevitable backlash against not having built enough houses, or offered enough in general to anyone under 45, could unite liberal young Tories stuck in rented London flats and hardcore rightwingers shouting (with some justification) that Liz Truss was right about confronting the Nimbys. But the core argument is likely to be a clash between the two classic approaches to defeat: change tack or double down.
The first camp will argue that the Tories lost because they came across as economically reckless, failing to understand or care about the damage done to middle England, and too shrill by half on social issues. They’ll be itching to say things the grassroots party still doesn’t want to hear about the damage done by a hard Brexit, both to the economy and the loyalties of remain-voting Tories in places such as north Oxfordshire – where Harrison is fighting the newly created Bicester and Woodstock seat, on the edge of David Cameron’s old patch. The bold will argue that it’s time for a more constructive relationship with Europe. But really what they want to do is put all that embarrassment behind them and get back to running everything like they used to. Harrison, whose selection his old boss Osborne described as a sign that the “seeds of renewal have already been planted”, could become a rallying point for those nostalgic for the stability of the old Cameron era.
The double-down contingent, however, are nowhere near ready to let go of their revolution. They’ll argue that, like communism, true Brexit was never really tried and could be made to work; that Boris Johnson’s deal was a bad one; punches were pulled on immigration; and Britain could still somehow be booming outside the EU given the kind of activist industrial strategy and radical reforms that Timothy (who is standing in Matt Hancock’s old West Suffolk seat) favoured. They don’t want to admit that Brexit has bombed but will also argue that it’s no longer possible just to go back to how things were; the political and economic realignments of the past seven years aren’t so simply reversed.
The ensuing battle threatens to be bloody, exhausting and bitter, perhaps even to the point of risking splits and breakaway factions. And the longer it drags on, the better for Labour, now starting to see the job of putting the country back together as a two-term project.
For the Conservative party to spend the next five years shouting at itself in the mirror would be Keir Starmer’s dream come true, and many Tories are now resigned exactly to that happening. After 1997, it took them eight years and two more defeats to smell the coffee (the title of Lord Ashcroft’s 2005 report bluntly explaining why they kept losing). Labour took 10 years to get the message after 2010. “More of the same, but louder” is rarely what voters want from a party they’ve just roundly rejected, but it’s what defeated parties are usually most comfortable offering.
There are two ways in which the 2024 Tories could still break the mould. One is for the “change tack” tendency to change their own habit of a lifetime and unite behind one credible candidate, instead of scattering in all directions as one nation Tories did during last summer’s leadership contest. The other is for Starmer to win only a slim majority, raising the prospect of his government imploding fairly quickly. If it scented the possibility of a swift return to power, the Conservative party might be encouraged to cut the bloodletting short.
But the most likely outcome remains a very long march back from the edge of the cliff, and long marches favour those who aren’t already exhausted. So watch the clear-eyed, the fresh-faced, the newcomers rested from the fray. Somewhere in a party’s ends are always its next beginnings, swimming out confidently against the prevailing tide. It’s just that history suggests the horizon is nearly always so much further away than they think.
• Gaby Hinsliff is a Guardian columnist
