“This is the darkest day in the history of the Tory party: they’ve all gone absolutely mad,” a senior Conservative said when Margaret Thatcher deposed Edward Heath. He was expressing the widely held view that the party had just made itself unelectable by lurching to the right. Thatcher went on to win three successive general elections.
Almost 50 years later, we hear the same – that Kemi Badenoch and Robert Jenrick are too extreme to lead the Tories to victory. And that by excluding both left of Conservative-centre candidates James Cleverly and Tom Tugendhat from the final ballot, Tory MPs have guaranteed Labour’s re-election in 2029.
Thatcher sensed what the Conservative establishment was missing: that the economic consensus was politically exhausted, and that the voters were willing to give her developing monetarism a chance.
As much of Europe moves right, the zeitgeist may be changing here too. It could be that Robert Jenrick’s unyielding approach or Kemi Badenoch’s confrontational style strike a chord with voters.
But there are reasons to question whether either will turn out to be the next Thatcher (who governed for more than a decade) or even the next David Cameron (who did so for five years).
These have less to do with the approach of the Tory leadership candidates than the fracturing of British politics. First, consider this contest itself. Thatcher won 52% of Conservative MPs’ votes in the final ballot of the 1975 leadership contest. Cameron won 46% in the 2005 parliamentary equivalent. These results provided stable platforms for both. But last week, Badenoch gained only 35% and Jenrick 34%. Cleverly took the other third of Tory MPs’ support.
These percentages were eerily reminiscent of the 2001 Conservative leadership election in which the eventual winner, Iain Duncan Smith, gained only 33% of his colleagues’ votes in the final ballot. His leadership didn’t end well. And, indeed, of the 2022 contest in which Liz Truss obtained only 32%. Furthermore, neither Duncan Smith nor Truss topped the parliamentary poll. Nonetheless, party members, who have the final say, plumped for both.
An election in which Tory MPs vote one way and Tory activists another is inherently problematic. It’s possible that Jenrick may find himself in the same position when this election ends. But whichever candidate wins, two-thirds of their colleagues will have voted for their opponents – not a great start.
Now turn to the issue of fragmentation more widely: Labour are under pressure from the Greens in some big cities and, potentially, from Reform in much of the north. At first hearing, that sounds like good news for the Conservatives.
But if Labour are challenged on three fronts, the Tories are fighting on four: against the Greens in some rural areas, against Reform for older, poorer voters and the Liberal Democrats for younger, suburban ones. And, of course, Labour.
Thus will 2029 be an infinitely tougher proposition for Conservatives than 1979 was, even if Labour’s position erodes. And the challenges – war abroad, demographic decline and low growth at home, plus the pervasive sense that the political system itself is broken – are more complex and intractable.
Both candidates are well aware of the scale of the problems. But perhaps unsurprisingly, their pitch to date has been to Tory members, not to the country as a whole. And the activists, at this stage of the electoral cycle, are not yet focused – as they were when they chose Cameron – on winning the next election.
The core of any winning offer to voters is economic credibility, value for money in the NHS, and lower immigration. To date, the candidates have had a lot to say about the third, less about the first – and little about the second.
Lord Goodman of Wycombe is a senior fellow at Policy Exchange
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