In the turbulent landscape of the UK Conservative Party, internal divisions are laid bare as dissent simmers over Prime Minister Rishi Sunak’s leadership. Despite sporadic rebellions, including a vote against Sunak’s Rwanda bill and the emergence of the Pop Con pressure group, the true depth of discord remains uncertain. Amid speculation, the party’s unity facade is cracking, signalling a departure from its once-disciplined image. As the Tories grapple with an identity crisis, the spectre of a far-left-like factionalism threatens to reshape the political landscape, jeopardising the party’s historic electoral prowess.
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By Adrian Wooldridge
On Jan. 15, the head of the Conservative Party’s election campaign, Isaac Levido, delivered a stark warning to backbench Tory MPs: Divided parties don’t win general elections. Ever since then, the Tories have done their utmost to appear as divided as possible.
On Jan. 17, 60 Tories voted against Prime Minister Rishi Sunak’s flagship Rwanda bill. On Jan. 23, four leading Tories launched yet another right-wing pressure group, Popular Conservativism or Pop Con. That evening, a former minister, Simon Clarke, published an article in the Daily Telegraph calling for Sunak to be replaced. “PM’s uninspiring leadership is the main obstacle to recovery for the party,” he declared.
“Simon who?” you might well ask. The MP for Middlesbrough South and East Cleveland (how those old-world British constituency names trip off the tongue!) is an obscure political figure whose only claim to distinction is his six-foot-seven height. Senior Tories immediately closed ranks against him — the list of people telling him to shut up included such luminaries of the right of the party as Sir David Davis, Sir Liam Fox and Dame Priti Patel — and the rebellion fizzled.
The revolt against Sunak’s Rwanda bill proved to equally short-lived: Only 11 MPs voted against the third reading of the bill. Pop Con looks more like a piece of astroturf than real evidence of a groundswell of opinion. Despite all the huffing and puffing in the press — is this the end of Rishi? Will Clarke’s article spark Cabinet resignations? Is a leadership challenge nigh? — the number of Tory MPs who have openly called for Sunak to step down has reached a grand total of two (MP Andrea Jenkyns being the other one).
Yet the fuss matters. The endless speculation not only creates an appearance of disunity, it also reflects a deeper reality. The Labour Party’s lead in the polls has been about 20 points for months. Sunak’s popularity level has reached depths only plumbed by Boris Johnson at the end of his premiership and Liz Truss in her 49 disastrous days in office. Tory MPs are beginning to panic about losing their seats in the next election, yet the more they panic, the more they increase the likelihood of that happening.
What was once the world’s most successful right-wing electoral machine increasingly looks like a mashup of a Ruritanian political regime and a far-left clique. Almost everyone interviewed on the radio about the Clarke fuss was either a knight or a dame. Since winning power in 2010, the Conservative Party has given 96 knighthoods or damehoods to sitting politicians. Two-thirds of these (64) were given to Tories, 26 to Labour MPs, five to Liberal Democrats and one to a Democratic Unionist. This marks an eightfold increase on the last Labour government (1997-2010), which only gave 11 gongs to sitting MPs. The Party has also liberally distributed lordships to Tory stalwarts — particularly to “Brexit barons” such as Charles Moore, Daniel Hannan, David Frost and Matthew Elliott.
These gongs are divorced from the traditional metrics of elevation — loyalty, distinction or long service. Sir Jacob Rees-Mogg was a serial rebel under Theresa May. Sir Gavin Williamson presided over exam chaos during the pandemic. The architect of the current flap, Sir Simon Clarke, is a relatively recent arrival (2017), who has devoted his energies to supporting two of the most disastrous politicians in the post-war era, Johnson and Truss.
The Tory Party is increasingly behaving like a far-left party — riven by factions and obsessed with pie-in-the-sky schemes. The ever-lengthening list of right-wing pressure groups has a Monty Python feeling to it: In place of the Judean People’s Front and the People’s Front of Judea, you have the New Conservatives and the Popular Conservatives. The right has the same basic beliefs as the left — that the reason why people don’t vote for you is that you’re not pure enough and that the most immediate enemies are your own colleagues.
The Conservative Party’s pet newspaper, the Daily Telegraph, is a jumble of Ruritania and ideological purity. The average edition contains a bizarre mixture of fawning articles about the monarchy and thunderous calls for shrinking the state, cutting taxes and getting tough on spongers. The paper has gone from slavishly supporting the party establishment to relentlessly trying to radicalize it. Wednesday’s edition contains not only Clarke’s call for Sunak to resign but a poll, paid for by the mysterious Conservative Britain Alliance, demonstrating that, if the public were given a choice between Sir Keir Starmer and an anonymous Conservative candidate who promised to cut taxes, get tougher on crime and migration and reduce NHS waiting lists, they would vote for the Conservative.
The Party’s right-wingers mix a good measure of ruthlessness with all this. The real challenge for purists is not how to minimize the damage in the next election — they have long since decided the election is lost — but how to make sure that Sunak and his supposed moderate supporters get the blame. They will then be able to capture the party’s leadership and complete the Brexit revolution.
The price for this might be high in the short-term — five or 10 years of a Labour government and unemployment in a tough job market for lots of your fellow Tory MPs. But who cares about such details when you have a Conservative utopia to deliver?
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