Expert analysis on the Tory crisis
Fraser Nelson, Tim Collins and Jeremy Warner
On Sunday, as the Conservatives were gathering in Manchester for one of the worst conferences in their history, I spoke to a senior Tory who was seriously worried about the Prime Minister’s health. She had a rotten cold, he said, and was refusing to deal with it properly. She had been advised to rest, but set herself a gruelling schedule, including an entirely avoidable trip to Estonia last week and 26 interviews the day before her speech. On a personal basis, this was brave. Professionally, it was reckless. It was as if she believed the act of carrying on would somehow make the problems go away.
There are many images that those of us who were at the conference will not forget in a hurry: the prankster handing her a P45, the cough sweet she held aloft, the stage set falling apart as she spoke. But perhaps the most memorable was the horror on the faces of Theresa May’s Cabinet colleagues as the speech unravelled. It was as if they were watching their party fall to pieces, their last hope vanish.
She needed to stay on after the election in June, and at least resemble a functioning Prime Minister. Now, they’re wondering if even this aim is unrealistic. And if so, what, if anything, can be done.
No one could blame Mrs May for everything that went wrong. She is governing to the best of her abilities, in circumstances that would crush a lesser person.
No leader can be expected to ensure personally that letters in the slogan “a country that works for everyone” would not fall off behind her as she spoke. No leader can personally stop someone lunging at her in the middle of her speech. The party apparatus is supposed to do all this – but it failed because the Conservative Party is decaying, and has been for some time. There comes a point where you can’t conceal this any more.
There were, of course, MPS who were so horrified that they wanted her to resign. She is not up to the job, they say, so why let her continue, prolonging the party’s agony – and her own?
The pro-brexit ministers have an easy answer to this: a leadership election is an indulgence that the party cannot afford. “Like it or not, the party has been tasked with leaving the European Union and we’ll be judged on that,” one Cabinet minister tells me. “All domestic policy comes second: we could create heaven on earth in Britain, but still fail if we mess up Brexit.” The Brexiteers believe that discussions are at a very sensitive stage, with time running out. To lose a leader now would make the negotiating position even weaker, they fear, resulting in the worst-imaginable Brexit deal.
In times gone by, men in grey suits might have come to see Mrs May and replaced her in a few days. “We Tories used to be quite good at this,” complains one veteran of leadership putsches. “The problem is that we’ve democratised it all now, so the membership decides over several weeks. So the leadership question isn’t who, it’s how.”
The MPS who are mulling a leadership putsch think they’d have to move in the new year and install a new leader in a fortnight. But none can think how they’d get it done so quickly.
In theory, a caretaker leader could be agreed upon to oversee stable government then step down before the next general election. (Michael Fallon, the defence secretary, is being mooted as one such candidate.) But as one privy councillor puts it, “It’s a risk. If we get this wrong, and mess up Brexit as a result, we’ll be lucky to get 10 per cent of the vote at the next election.”
It’s easy to forget that the seamless transition to Mrs May after the Brexit referendum was a fluke. Had Andrea Leadsom not imploded at such an early stage, the leadership race would have lasted all summer – and, worse, Leadsom might have won.
This is why, in spite of such a calamitous conference speech, Mrs May’s Cabinet are not plotting to replace her. They’re more worried about her resigning, and plunging them into a fresh nightmare. They openly fret about what Philip, her husband, would have said to her on the way home from Manchester. They have been going through the options: Amber Rudd, with her 346-vote majority? Boris Johnson, who has acquired so many enemies among the MPS who decide such issues? Gamble on a new MP, at such a crucial time in British history?
The greatest fear is of a general election, which (as Mrs May demonstrated) so often follows new leaders. “We were complacent before, and we’re not now,” says one Cabinet member. “There are too many places where we’d be crushed by Momentum.”
The Corbynite activists are enthusiastic and well-organised, and can mobilise hundreds to campaign in target seats (like Mrs Rudd’s) just for fun. The Tories struggle to find activists to campaign for them, even in the final and most desperate days of a general election campaign. To fight for a party, you need to believe in a cause: and what, today, is the Tory cause?
Years of neglecting this question have led the party to its current impasse. The Manchester conference exposed a vacuum where an agenda should be. We saw a confused leader’s speech which pretended to defend the free market system, while announcing policies that attacked it. We saw a consensus that Corbyn is now winning the battle of ideas, but general cluelessness about how to fight back. We saw hope, that there might be four years to resolve this problem – followed by the horror of realising that things might fall apart a lot sooner.
Brexit talks will continue for another 18 long months and the Tories must now consider the possibility that Mrs May might not last that long. So what to do? The Cabinet won’t act: its indecision is final. Some backbenchers want to move now but to do so without an agreed candidate, or any Cabinet support, would look more like a spasm than a strategy.
So Tory MPS spend this weekend in an agonised consensus: that she can’t go on, but she can’t be replaced either. And that their only hope is to hope, pray and wait for a solution to present itself – because, as things stand, none is in sight.