Notes on the Tory leadership race

Calm down dears

Before too long it’ll be over. Following the resignation of Boris Johnson as leader of the Conservatives, there will soon enough be a replacement and ultimately a new prime minister.

I claim no great insight into what will happen. As of writing the former chancellor Rishi Sunak has the most backers, but the other candidates still look like plausible winners.

Nonetheless, I do have gripes about what’s being said about all this. So, in my contribution to the debate, here they are.

When you support planting trees to make more flags. Credit: NCVO London

A visceral dislike for a political party is irrational, stupid and dull

Few better descriptions of the Conservative Party exist than that of reactionary writer Peter Hitchens, who calls it “an organisation for obtaining office for the sons of gentlemen”. This might be updated to include the daughters of gentlemen and those of humble birth who have made too much money in finance, but the point largely stands.

It is a cynical organisation whose aim is to obtain power and stifle change. And yet the hatred many express of the most minor players in the party is beyond any principled opposition to the party, or any view one could reasonably hold.

Consider my friend who once called deputy prime minister Dominic Raab a “cunt”. What does any of us know about Raab that merits that description? That he has been in favour of deporting criminals? That he has tried to make striking harder? That he previously failed to appreciate how important Dover was to UK trade? That he does karate?

Most haters of any given politician would struggle to name even this much about the subject of their ire, which I’ve largely gleaned from Wikipedia. And yet they form incredibly strong opinions, largely from a general prejudice against whichever party they are railing against.

Raab, for what it’s worth, used to help prosecute war criminals. Politicians contain multitudes and are more interesting if you bother to listen to them. Doing otherwise is irrational, stupid and dull.

Tories are flexible and ambitious, but they do have some principles

Closely allied to the first point is this sense that Tories are uniquely power-grabbing. Politicians who succeed with the Conservative Party are seen as personally ambitious, without any scruple or principle.

It is also a long noticed feature of the Tories that they are more flexible (to put it politely) about policy. Others have compellingly argued this is because it is conservatism’s nature to adapt to events, while the left is more prone to impose its designs on society.

Even so, only a dimwit can have failed to notice the Conservative Party’s role as a Margaret Thatcher fan club (or at times a Winston Churchill fan club). There are genuine ideologues among the Tories, whether it be the reactionary Priti Patel or the literally evangelical Brexiteer Steve Baker. There is much to be regretted about the ideologically fixated, but you can hardly accuse them of selling out principles for power (see Jeremy Corbyn).

This is not to say many of these people aren’t also personally ambitious. But this is only saying that those who put themselves forward for public office really want to, er, be in public office. To get people to do things usually requires a personal incentive, and vanity and status anxiety are universal foibles.

It’s fine to install a new prime minister without a general election

I’ve said elsewhere that lawyerly reasoning is nowhere so frequently found as in debates on constitutional theory. But you can never complain too much about this.

Tory haters have lately taken to arguing that every time the party replaces its leader a general election should be held. These are often the same people who would deny that Johnson had a personal mandate from voters from the December 2019 general election, where 14 million people voted for Conservative candidates.

You may hold a maximum of one of these views. Either you want us to move further towards a more presidential system in which leadership is everything and the House of Commons is merely the vehicle by which support is expressed, or you don’t.

As it stands we have a formal parliamentary system in which the prime minister is chosen by MPs and must retain their confidence to stay in office. Media coverage and voter behaviour in Britain does have presidential elements, but these are only partial and hard to quantify.

It’s therefore acceptable to install a new prime minister under this system without another general election. Prime ministers who have entered Downing Street under these circumstances include Johnson, Theresa May, Gordon Brown, John Major, and James Callaghan, to name just the recent ones.

The Tory candidate list shows the hollowness of diversity

It has become cliched for progressives to call for more diversity in all areas of life, meaning a greater representation of women and ethnic and sexual minorities in leadership positions such as public office.

Such people have a point inasmuch as people do find it discouraging if they can’t see anyone like them in certain fields. And, as far as politics goes, there’s no doubt that people from different backgrounds bring different views and raise different issues that might otherwise be ignored.

But the rider to this is that being part of a given demographic has a loose relationship to whether you’ll back policies that benefit that group. The contested legacy for women since Margaret Thatcher’s premiership is a case in point.

Disappointments like this are why some pundits like Marina Purkiss argue that the six ethnic minority candidates for the Tory leadership aren’t genuinely diverse because they want to “pull up the ladder”. (Read the comments below that tweets for some, er, robust responses.)

In truth the Tory party is an obvious place for ethnic minorities for two reasons. First, ambition is found in every group in society, and the Conservatives appeal to that through their ‘aspirational’ values.

Second, many immigrant groups are socially conservative, which is another specialism of the Tories. While historically the Conservative Party pushed a specifically British social conservatism, the at times dogmatic liberalism of the left has made the party a more natural home for ethnic minorities.

Finally, who the next prime minister is matters, but not too much

Although I can’t find the source, former chancellor George Osborne once said that the majority of choices made by any government would have been the same irrespective of who is in power. That assumes a vaguely rational administration, but it sounds right to me.

Whoever wins the Tory leadership contest will face the cost of living crisis, ongoing friction from Brexit, and Russian militarism, among other things. Should Labour take over after the next general election (currently the likeliest scenario, in my view) Keir Starmer will also face those problems.

It matters who is making the decisions, but you can overstate it. Humans find the soap opera of Westminster easier to understand and more emotionally compelling than wider impersonal forces, but the latter are what really counts. So get excited, but not too much.