Twice yesterday the full gravity of the predicament facing the Conservative Party became compellingly clear. First, Boris Johnson, in a speech of epic bluster and bombast supporting the Government’s vote of confidence in itself, resorted to the rhetoric of Donald Trump and his supporters at their most wretchedly deluded.
“Some people will say as I leave office that this is the end of Brexit,” the Prime Minister bellowed, “and the leader of the opposition and the Deep State will prevail in its plot to haul us back into alignment with the EU as a prelude to our eventual return.”
“Deep State”? This notion — that government is mostly controlled by clandestine, entrenched vested interests and bureaucracy resistant to the will of the people — has long been one of the most demented conceits deployed by the US populist Right.
To hear the outgoing PM of this country resort to such nonsense was seriously depressing. It was also a portent of things to come: the Johnson camp has already honed its betrayal narrative, its deluded version of what has happened in the past seven months.
Second, the final television debate between the remaining contenders for the Conservative leadership — due to be hosted by Sky News this evening — was cancelled, after Rishi Sunak and Liz Truss announced that they would not be participating.
Following the heated and personal exchanges of the ITV debate on Sunday night, the former Chancellor and still-serving Foreign Secretary evidently felt that there was nothing to be gained from tearing chunks out of each other yet again in a sweltering TV studio.
Such is the pass reached in 2022 by the most successful electoral movement in the history of Western democracy. So riven has it become by personal bitterness, so vacuous in its policy discussion, so infantile in its conduct, that its leading figures seek actively to minimise public scrutiny of the process leading to the selection — by, at most, 160,000 Conservative members — of the next party leader and prime minister.
At the time of writing, the field has been whittled down to four: Rishi Sunak, Penny Mordaunt, Truss and Kemi Badenoch. What is already clear is that Sunak will be one of the two finalists (last night, in the third ballot, he was only five votes shy of the 120 he requires to be in the deciding head-to-head over the summer). And this is apt, since he has been leading the field from the start.
After a political near-death experience in March and April — in which his family’s tax affairs almost finished off his frontline career in public life — he has bounced back to stake his claim to the top job. If he is declared the victor on September 5, he will be the youngest prime minister since Lord Liverpool in 1812 (Tony Blair was a year older — 43 — when he entered No.10 in 1997).
The flipside is that his comeback strategy has ultimately framed the race as a battle between his own campaign and all the “Stop Rishi” elements within the party. True, those elements have yet to coalesce into an organised force, united behind a single candidate to rival Sunak. But I have been struck in the past 24 hours by the readiness of some Tory MPs to consider almost any strategy that will thwart “The Rish”.
The front-runner’s enemies — plentiful in number — see him as a captive of Treasury orthodoxy. They regard his commitment to Brexit as bloodless. Above all, they see him as the man who betrayed King Boris. He is, in their eyes, Michael Heseltine to Johnson’s Margaret Thatcher: a ludicrous comparison in so many ways — Thatcher, for a start, was not driven from office by disgrace — but one that is already taking grip of the Conservative imagination.
This matters enormously because, for a start, it will shape the horse-trading in the remaining rounds, as the final four are whittled down to two. It will also do much to shape the character of Sunak’s premiership, should he win.
This is the big picture: at precisely the moment that it should be renewing and refreshing itself, the governing party is primarily using the leadership contest to settle scores and exact vengeance for what made the contest necessary in the first place.
If Sunak becomes PM, his inheritance will be one of destruction, paranoia and a deranged longing among many of his parliamentary colleagues to make him pay for his political sins. No wonder Keir Starmer is smiling.
