Anthony Browne is MP for South Cambridgeshire, the Chair of the Conservative backbench Treasury Committee and a member of the Treasury Select Committee.
Choosing a new leader is difficult at any time, but particularly so when your party is in Government. You are not just choosing a new leader, but a new Prime Minister. We have such a wide field of candidates, but how do we decide which one to go for? What are the selection criteria?
Conservative MPs have to whittle down the list to two, before it will go to Party members for the final vote. The reason MPs support a candidate can be different from members: we are choosing from amongst our colleagues, who we know personally.
It is noticeable that junior ministers are generally supporting their cabinet ministers. MPs often support their geographic neighbours, who they know well. But MPs are also strongly aware of who will play well with voters in their own constituency. Only MPs in safe seats can support a candidate just because they like their ideological views.
It clearly needs to be someone who can lead the country, unite the party and win the next general election. But what else? Here are ten things I think we need to look for:
- The biggest single challenge we face as a country is the economy – after 15 years of sluggish growth, hammered by Covid and the global inflation crisis: we are on the brink of recession. Boosting growth will help solve a lot of our other problems. The new leader must be someone with strong credibility on the economic front. That means someone who understands business, and can make the tough decisions to balance the budget, as well as someone who will push for lower taxes and growth.
- After the Boris Johnson years, the Conservative Party’s reputation has taken a battering on the trust and integrity front, and the new leader must be someone who oozes probity. We cannot have a new leader prompting a new round of sleaze storms. Rather, we need someone so obviously clean that the sleaze narrative quickly fades into the past, and cannot be revitalised at the election.
- We need someone that the party can unite around. Brexit is behind us, but the fractures it caused are still visible. There is sufficient suspicion on the strong Brexit end of the party about the forces of Remain, that I think it important that the new leader can gain its trust. That doesn’t mean that the new leader needs to have campaigned for Brexit, but probably best that they weren’t one of the leading campaigners against it. It cannot be someone at far end of either of wing of the party.
- We need someone who can appeal to the whole country – a leader who plays well in the Red Wall as well as the Blue Wall. It must be someone who can also appeal to voters north of the border, to take the steam out of the IndyRef2 campaign. It must be someone who appeals to the political centre ground: that is where elections are won.
- One of the Conservative’s electoral trump cards is that we are competent: Labour may sell ideals, but we get things done. The reputation for competence has taken a battering in the Johnson years, and we need to restore it. We need a leader who is not just a good communicator, but has a proven track record of being capable of delivery.
- Ideally, the new leader will have experience of Government, and knows how to pull the right levers to get the machine to work. Both Tony Blair and David Cameron became Prime Ministers without any experience of Government, but they had been tested by the huge demands of being Leader of the Opposition, and after long periods of opposition there were few leadership contenders who had been in government anyway. We have been in power for 12 years, and are awash with credible candidates with experience of Cabinet.
- We need someone who will be a good campaigner, taking us to the next general election, and retaining the seats we won in 2019. It needs to be someone good with the media, good in Parliament, and good with voters. They need emotional intelligence as well as general intelligence.
- We need someone who can credibly talk for Britain on the international stage. They will represent us in meetings with other global leaders, and in international organisations. Would they be credible standing next to the US President? After Brexit, they need to be able to forge productive relations with other countries across the globe.
- The new leader needs to be a Conservative. That might sound obvious, but things have got confusing recently. We are fundamentally a conservative country, which is why we keep electing Conservative governments. They need to have a vision that we can all buy into. Governments have a huge opportunity to define the national debates. We cannot go into the next election trying to be Labour-lite: the voters might go for the real thing.
- We need the best person for the job. There are those who say it must be a woman, but I think it needs to be the best person. If that person happens to be a woman or from an ethnic minority, so much the better. Personally, I would be delighted if the Conservative Party produced not just the first woman prime minister, but also the first ethnic minority prime minister. The same goes for the first Muslim prime minister, or the first prime minister who arrived in Britain as a refugee.
So who does this all point to? In contrast to opposition claims that we have a dearth of talent, I am struck by how many credible candidates we have: our problem is we have such a wide choice. There are at least half a dozen candidates who would make very good prime ministers. Rishi Sunak, Sajid Javid, Grant Shapps and Nadhim Zahawi are all particularly strong candidates, as are Liz Truss, Jeremy Hunt and Tom Tugendhat.
I would be genuinely happy for any of them to be chosen, and would easily rally behind them. But like all MPs I have to choose, and I am going to choose Sunak. As a member of the Treasury select committee, and chair of the Backbench Treasury Committee, I have worked closely with him and his Treasury team for the past two and a half years he has been Chancellor, and been very impressed.
He is rational and reasonable, with good judgement and communication skills. During the pandemic, he handled the most difficult challenge the Treasury has faced for decades with skill and flair. He is clearly strong on the economic front, and I know he wants to cut taxes once we have the fiscal room to do so. He appeals to voters in Richmond, Yorkshire (his constituency) as well as voters in Richmond, London. He voted Brexit, but I am sure can unite the various wings of the party. I don’t think most voters care about his wife’s wealth – he himself is from a reasonably modest background. Against the ten criteria above, he scores extremely well. He has my vote.