What is the point of the Conservative party? That’s not quite how the question was worded on Monday night’s secret ballot of Tory MPs, but it describes the result. Boris Johnson survived this confidence vote but just 59% of his MPs backed him: fewer than supported Theresa May, back when Johnson was the one trying to push her off a cliff. Such anaemic support must embolden rebels to keep chipping away, whether via ministerial resignations, strategic revolts over legislation, or moving to scrap the rule that theoretically prevents another such vote within the year. A miserable, hog-tied future beckons.
The back-of-a-fag-packet plan for renewal Johnson brandished last minute – promising to sell off housing association properties and axe civil servants – plus his insistence when quizzed on lockdown parties that “I’d do it again” seem only to have hardened resolve.
In his public letter calling for Johnson to go, the former Treasury minister Jesse Norman cited not just the prime minister’s “grotesque” attempt to claim that Sue Gray’s Partygate report had vindicated him or his “ugly” plan to export refugees to Rwanda, but also the way Johnson had hollowed his party out. This government had “a large majority, but no long-term plan” for doing much with it, Norman wrote. While the economy crumbled around him, all Johnson could do was “to keep changing the subject and to create political and cultural dividing lines mainly for your advantage”.
Coming as it does from the husband of Kate Bingham, the woman who ran Britain’s much-admired vaccines taskforce, his letter crystallises a longing among moderate Tories for what they see as a return to briskly organised sanity after the anarchy of the Johnson years; for a conservatism that conserves things instead of smashing them up, and seeks to create economic conditions in which its traditional supporters (if not necessarily the nation as a whole) can prosper. But not every Tory wants to return to that status quo, and therein lies the challenge for Johnson’s wannabe successors.
The lesson of May’s and Margaret Thatcher’s defenestrations is that once the idea of regicide is floated, the end is just a matter of time. That said, this confidence vote is different from the one May survived only to quit five months later.
Many rebel MPs still had some lingering personal respect or sympathy for May and the impossible position Brexit had placed her in; but they hated her deal, and were very clear about what they wanted instead. Monday’s vote, however, was driven mostly by toe-curling embarrassment at Johnson’s personal behaviour, and the objection isn’t to one specific policy so much as a chaotic absence of them. A revolt uniting liberal Tory remainers such as Caroline Nokes with the arch-Brexiter (and, perhaps more importantly in this case, devout Christian) Steve Baker is one driven less by ideology than by moral outrage, plus panic among holders of marginal seats.
All they really agree on is that anything would be better than this, yet even now some of their colleagues are still holding out for a miracle.
Ideally many Tories would like a squeaky-clean replacement leader untarnished by scandal, who can nonetheless repeat the same astonishing trick Johnson did in 2019, uniting lifelong shire Tories with defecting Labour voters in northern towns to win another landslide. But that’s not on offer. Johnson won by promising to get Brexit done (generously interpreted by Conservative-voting remainers as a promise to at least get the inevitable over with quickly) and keep Jeremy Corbyn out, both appealing ideas for disgruntled Labour voters at the time but ones that won’t wash now. Brexit is already as done as most leavers required, while being anything but over in the sense remainers had hoped, and Keir Starmer is nothing like the bogeyman Corbyn was. The best that Conservative MPs can hope for now is someone capable of forming a smaller but more honest and coherent electoral coalition, built on promises that (unlike Brexit) don’t crumble to pieces on contact with reality.
That doesn’t necessarily require choosing between red and blue wall seats. Westminster’s obsession with geographical divides obscures the fact that on some things, Britain is pretty much united in exasperation. Voters in Wakefield, where the government now expects to lose the upcoming byelection, tell pollsters the biggest hurdle to voting Tory is that they consider Johnson a liar. But “Waitrose woman”, the stereotypical well-heeled voter the Tories fear they’re losing to the Liberal Democrats in Hampshire or Surrey, would probably say the same.
The second biggest complaint in Wakefield is that Johnson is out of touch. That, too, echoes a broader exasperation with his failure to tackle the everyday bread-and-butter stuff that matters: soaring inflation, bloated NHS waiting lists, a broken housing market, and the general sense of chaotic neglect felt by people battling back to work after a bank holiday through train strikes and cancelled flights. North or south, remainer or leaver, most people just want a prime minister who isn’t actively embarrassing and can swiftly get a grip. Unfortunately for the Tories, Brexit hasn’t half shrunk their talent pool.
Too many people who could have been honing their leadership skills for the last three years have either left politics or declined to serve. That leaves some candidates for whom a contest has arguably come too soon – such as the education secretary, Nadhim Zahawi, and former soldier Tom Tugendhat, both interesting politicians but relatively inexperienced for a time of what looks like looming economic crisis – or too late. Moderate Tories might naturally rally behind Jeremy Hunt, who tweeted on Monday that it was time for the Tories to “change or lose”, but many now worry that putting forward someone who lost to Johnson in 2019 smacks of forcing grassroots Tories to admit they were wrong last time. Picking a leader from among the remaining candidates – from Rishi Sunak to Sajid Javid, Liz Truss to Priti Patel, Penny Mordaunt to some as yet undeclared outsider – makes no sense without first deciding what it is they’re meant to be leading.
Is the Conservative party now just a rackety vehicle for increasingly angry culture wars, or did the Queen’s poignant wish for a “renewed sense of togetherness” enduring beyond the jubilee make some stop and think about what they have become? After the 12 years they’ve had in power, what exactly do they want another five for? The game is afoot; the question finally out there. Now to see if anyone has an answer.
Gaby Hinsliff is a Guardian columnist
