THIS WEEK, the remaining four contenders to lead the Conservative Party are at the annual conference as part of a “beauty parade” before Conservative MPs decide which two will face a vote of the members to select Rishi Sunak’s successor.
The remaining four are Tom Tugendhat, James Cleverly, Kemi Badenoch, and Robert Jenrick.
If the MPs lose their marbles, the members will be faced with a choice between a weathervane-like careerist with a very dubious ministerial career (Mr Jenrick) and a shoot-from-the-lip wildcard political zero with a penchant for arguing with their own shadow (Ms Badenoch).
A TRACK RECORD OF WRONG CHOICES
If the MPs are serious about trying to return a Conservative government within the next decade, they’ll choose Messrs Cleverly and Tugendhat to face the membership. Of course, if they do, the turnout will be microscopic. The members know what they want: demented rhetoric and gong-banging lunacy.
The evidence all points to that reality: the members chose Iain Duncan-Smith, Boris Johnson, Liz Truss. They also chose William Hague over Ken Clarke. Although William Hague is a (hugely) more substantial political figure than any of Duncan-Smith, Johnson or Truss, it was the wrong choice to make in 1997 but would’ve been the right call in 2001.
The membership’s track record on picking leaders isn’t great. The reason is straightforward: the leader of a parliamentary group must command the loyalty of enough of the parliamentary Party to enable them to exert control over votes in parliament. On the other hand, the winner of a popularity contest with a party’s membership has only to appeal to the majority of members who bother to vote.
Labour has its own dreadful experiences with the membership imposing a leader on a parliamentary party that believes their choice is demonstrably wrong: see Milliband, E. or Corbyn, J.
A little further back in time, we go back to a period within Labour politics that has curious echoes in the Conservative Party today.
Towards the end of the 1970s, Labour was in a minority administration and relied on the support of the then-Liberal Party, Plaid Cymru, and the SNP to keep going. The political scene was in ferment, and conflict, social and political, was the order of the day.
If you lived through it, you might not remember it, readers. Neo-nazi thugs marched in the streets. Violent protests erupted outside the gates of factories. Football stadiums were hubs for racist thuggery that spilt over into the streets and railway stations near them. The cost of living spiralled as inflation leapt over 20%. Workers went on strike over pay, conditions, grievances, and what used to be called “pay norms”. Labyrinthine Spanish practices permeated the workplaces and made running a business for a profit almost impossible. Law and order, the very functions of civil society, appeared on the brink of collapse. As we rolled into the 1980s, the world stood on the brink of global nuclear conflict.
If you believed the Jeremiahs of the left and right, the end was nigh and couldn’t come soon enough.
THE END OF CONSENSUS
Faced with the unravelling consensus of the post-war years, both parties chose to abandon it. Managerialism, the trend that had its roots in the governments of Baldwin and Chamberlain before 1939, sputtered to irrelevance as the oil-rich states of the Middle East began flexing their muscles and upset the settled order.
If you can remember the global price and economic shock after the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2021 but not the events of the 1970s, think of the former but exponentially worse when imagining the latter.
In response, the Conservative Party moved to the right; the Labour Party turned left.
The legate of the left was Anthony Wedgewood-Benn, formerly Viscount Stansgate, a scion of wealth and privilege.
Tony Benn, as he became (and Wedgie Benn as the right-wing tabloids christened him), was one of those politicians who, in Denis Healy’s lethal phrase, “immatured with age”.
Having started as one of Harold Wilson’s “intellectually negligible whizzkids”, Mr Benn came to believe in democracy so much that he thought Labour Party members should dictate government policy and that Labour MPs be delegated to carry out their wishes. His reasoning was simple: the unions and the members were the Labour Party’s lifeblood and reason for existence. Their priorities should direct Labour’s every political decision.
Eighteen years of unbroken Conservative government between 1979 and 1997 were the almost inevitable result of a party less interested in governing Britain than it was in speaking to itself.
Now, the contenders for the Conservative Party’s leadership are engaged in much the same enterprise as their former left-wing bugbear.
Every candidate to lead the Conservative Party is, more or less, saying that members should have more of a say. Some want members to have a far greater say than others.
A RECIPE FOR IRRELEVANCE
Political parties should represent their members’ interests. However, the function of government is not to serve a self-selecting electorate that is bound to be unrepresentative of the whole nation. The function of government – and therefore the function of opposition to the government – is to act in interests that are sometimes adverse to party members or that the party members oppose. An MP is not a delegate. An MP cannot poll their constituents or their local party membership before voting on issues of national importance that affect all people.
MPs must be free to use their judgement. That principle underpins Conservative thought and has done so since Edmund Burke enunciated it almost exactly 250 years ago. It applies to MPs of all parties.
A little later, Burke spelt out his position more explicitly. An MP should “resist the desires of his constituents when his judgment assured him they were wrong.”
If you only listen to the party membership, you cannot speak for all the people you represent. An MP represents all the voters in their constituency, not only the ones who voted for them. But an MP cannot be a cypher for others’ fluctuating passions and opinions.
The Conservatives need to learn Tony Benn’s and his followers’ control of the Labour Party. If they need a further illustration, the final lesson is where it ended for Labour.
In 1983, Labour went into a General Election with a manifesto that one of its MPs described (rightly) as “the longest suicide note in history”.
