When it is said, and it is said often at the moment, that Rishi Sunak is no good at politics, my mind goes back to the strangest party conference speech of modern times. In September of last year, Mr Sunak took to the stage in Manchester, the philosophical capital of the world as Disraeli once called it, and declared that he, the incumbent Prime Minister, was the candidate of change. He, the man in 10 Downing Street, was here to diagnose that there had been thirty years of dismal politics – 17 of which were under Conservative governments – and that he, the current leader of the self-same Conservative party, was the antidote.
As a conference speech, it defined a new territory where the hopelessly naïve meets the frankly bizarre. To announce himself as the candidate of change is exhibit one in the prosecution of the case that Rishi Sunak is no good at politics. Yet there is a sense in which change was exactly the right message and Mr Sunak might be better at politics than he looks. Neither of these two counter-intuitive suggestions offer any comfort to the Conservative party, as we shall see.
The Conservative party is on course to lose the next election badly, in part for reasons I set out in my long essay on their failure. There is a lot of speculation at the moment that Rishi Sunak might be replaced as leader. A sixth Prime Minister in 14 years, Penny Mordaunt, has apparently said that her price for taking on the job is that she is guaranteed to be allowed to try to rebuild the party after the defeat she regards as inevitable. Yet this is a nonsense of a plan. The plotters who want Mr Sunak out have nothing in common, politically, with Ms Mordaunt. She is not the answer to any of the questions they are posing which can be summarised as: why is the world changing so much and why is the world not exactly as I tell it that it ought to be?
This is a clue to what Mr Sunak might have done. He might, as soon as he took on the top job, have chosen to confront its party with its failings. He might have chosen to define himself against his predecessors Boris Johnson and Liz Truss. He could have promised that he would restore standards in public life and not bring ideological nostrums to a sophisticated market economy. He might have dropped Suella Braverman from his Cabinet and declared that his would be a government that would find a better balance between the demands of the economy for immigrant labour and the anxiety of the population.
Sunak might, in other words, have declared himself to be the change candidate. But the change in question is not a change from the standard politics of the nation that he tried and failed to define in his Manchester speech. It is a change from the direction the Conservative party has taken since the departure of David Cameron. The coup de theatre of bringing Cameron into the Foreign Office should have been the embodiment of a substantive change of approach. A period of solid government of a centre-right kind was the best possible hope that Sunak had for minimising a Tory defeat which was, after the Truss-Kwarteng fiasco, all but inevitable.
Instead, Sunak chose, with no hope of success, to conciliate his party. He could have abandoned the dreadful Rwanda bill on his first day in office; he chose to persist. He could have told Suella Braverman her services were no longer required; he made her Home Secretary. He could have called time on the stupid and forlorn demand to wage a culture war; instead he promoted and indulged the silliest warriors such as Lee Anderson and Jonathan Gullis. The right of the Conservative party, though, cannot be conciliated. They are the people who will never take yes for an answer and the battle to be the next leader of the Conservative party is therefore on in earnest.
These strange decisions are what people mean what they say that Rishi Sunak is not very good at politics. That is, on the face of it, a strange thing to say about someone who has become Prime Minister. He can’t be that bad at politics if he is Prime Minister, can he? Sunak does indeed give the impression of a nerdy would-be tech bro stumbling onto a political panel and asking why businesspeople cannot take over. He is not exactly a political natural and his ratings are now lower than Liz Truss’s so he has hardly cut a dash with the public either. But here is the really alarming thought for the Tory party. Sunak might actually be better at politics than the candidates who are lined up to replace him.
Let’s imagine the options in a sensible world. The last time the Tory party lost office it found three failed leaders: the young star (Hague), the right wing duffer (Duncan Smith) and the caretaker manager (Howard). Clearly, they came in the wrong order, and it is always better to bypass a duffer, so let’s imagine that the Tories were to go for a caretaker leader in the autumn. The best option would be Jeremy Hunt, with Michael Gove as the other option. There is not the remotest chance of either winning even if either of them should want it. There are one or two perfectly sensible outsiders. Despite a party conference speech of extra special oddness, Penny Mordaunt can usually be relied upon to be vaguely sensible. James Cleverly would be the lowest common denominator. The conservative commentator Tim Montgomerie has made the case for Tom Tugendhat but his chances are surely slim.
The Tory party might be set already on a right-wing duffer. Kemi Badenoch is the most talented of an untalented crew. But the candidate who most perfectly embodies the terrible place that may tempt the Tories is Suella Braverman. Inspired perhaps by Liz Truss’s dreadful flirtation with nasty politics on her American tour, the egregious Braverman has been announced as a speaker at the next National Conservative Conference, to be held in Brussels on the 16th and 17th of April. Alongside the yawn-inducingly ubiquitous Nigel Farage and Matthew Goodwin, the keynote speaker will be the self-declared “illiberal democrat” Viktor Orban, the Prime Minister of Hungary, an ally of Putin and a man who is gradually dismantling the institutions of a free society. All of a sudden, Sunak doesn’t look quite as bad at politics as all that.
There is something missing in the analogy so far. The Conservative party after John Major had a star in William Hague. Where is the star in this later version of the same play? There isn’t one. The bald fact is that the Conservative party does not have anyone – the caretaker managers apart – capable of winning an election any time soon. The stars might be in the new intake. There is no future for the party in the preposterous nonsense of the Badenochs and Bravermans. Mordaunt and Cleverly are associated with nothing at all. In time the Conservative party will recover but first it needs a serious debate about why the public have turned on it.
There is no prospect that such a debate can be conducted by the crop of candidates who will survive an election defeat so here is a long-term thought. There will come a time when the party has an argument about the conservative corporatism of Nick Timothy, prospective MP for West Suffolk, and the more standard Cameronian centre-right politics of Rupert Harrison, perhaps the soon-to-be MP for Bicester and Woodstock. It might be a long time in coming. The Tory party burned through three failed leaders before it found David Cameron but this is the way it will, once again, get better at politics.
I guess they could be gifted an early return to power in the same way Labour has been gifted it by the shambolic Tories? A nightmare scenario, unless you think Labour is now disciplined enough not to go all Corbynite any time soon?
It really depends on what's left of them tho right? If it's roughly a hundred odd MPs - and they've been mauled by Reform, mightn't they be dragged yet further to the right? And if that happens, and you accept 2029 is a write off - how do they deal with the 2034 voters? Those voters will have an ingrained memory of the utter chaos the Tories induced in the economy and wider society, when - and this is the punchline: in 2034 the over sixty fives, their last redoubt, that over sixty five cohort will be Gen X. And I mean... Gen X hate them with a passion ffs. I'd argue the Conservatives are structurally/demographically buggered, they'll realise it sooner or later, and they'll have to reconfigure a new party somehow. Or rather, the extremely wealthy slice of English society that likes to have its own political vehicle will demand a new, actually viable, political party be created to represent their goals and desires.