One slightly strange feature of last night’s drama over the Safety of Rwanda Bill was the resignations Lee Anderson, Brendan Clarke-Smith, and Jane Stevenson, who resigned their roles to back the amendments tabled by Robert Jenrick and Sir Bill Cash.
Resignations are sometimes the stuff of the highest political theatre, the late Geoffrey Howe’s departure from Margaret Thatcher’s government being perhaps the archetypical example. Sure enough, headlines about an “assault on Sunak’s authority” followed yesterday’s events.
Yet of the three, only Stevenson had actually resigned a government brief, as PPS at the Department for Business, Energy, and Industrial Strategy (BEIS). Anderson and Clarke-Smith merely quit (or were sacked from) party positions, as deputy chairmen.
This was enough for the Guardian to describe both men as “senior Tories”. But I mean no disrespect to either, nor to any other current or former holder of the title, when I ask: were they?
That’s a sincere question. It isn’t obvious.
After all, at present the party still boasts no fewer than four deputy chairs: Jack Lopresti, Nickie Aiken, Luke Hall, and Matt Vickers. If they need reinforcement there are three vice-chairs too: Saqib Bhatti, Sara Britcliffe, and Alexander Stafford. Of all these only one, Aiken, is mentioned in the ‘Party Structure and Organisation’ page of the Conservatives’ website. Not to mention the chairman, Richard Holden.
Are all of them senior Tories? If so, presumably the actual payroll vote – your secretaries of state, ministers, and so on – are too. At what point does the term cease to be useful?
This doesn’t mean that such positions aren’t important. Nor even that resignations from them don’t matter: for any MP who has accepted prime ministerial patronage to be prepared to sacrifice is a useful gauge of the strength of feeling on a given issue.
Yet they are also, in part, a product of the steady expansion of the de facto payroll vote, which we first noted on this site over a decade ago and again during the parliamentary battles over Brexit. I wrote in 2016:
“Of the 330 Conservative MPs, we find no fewer than 133 – more than a third – are on the formal payroll. Prime Ministerial patronage extends further still, however, with another nine MPs serving as ‘Trade Envoys’. Other patronage positions, such as Vice-Chairs of the Party, will swell these ranks yet further.
“This adds up to 142 out of 330, or just 23 MPs short of half the Parliamentary Conservative Party, confirmed recipients of Number 10’s largesse in some form or other.”
Such efforts to deepen the purse of patronage are, at least in part, understandable in light of the increasing fractiousness of the Commons in recent decades. We have nonetheless previously criticised the expansion of this payroll vote auxiliary, precisely because it helps to undermine the independence of backbench MPs (especially when combined with growing hostility towards MPs having outside income).
But yesterday’s headlines perhaps illustrate the downside risk for prime ministers who indulge too freely in this sort of practice.
Widening the (un)payroll in this way necessarily mean bringing in MPs with less loyalty to the prime minister. Not just because Downing Street is casting a wider net, but because the prizes are smaller and, as a result, easier to offer as sweeteners to potential troublemakers whom the leader would not give a role in the government proper.
That may be fine when the going’s good. When it’s not, though, there’s an increased chance of resignations, with all damage this does to perceptions of the prime minister’s authority. The media do not have a rigorous taxonomy of what constitutes a “senior” Conservative, and it’s certainly not in their interests to develop one for the age of the payroll vote auxilia if it means forgoing juicy stories about quittings and sackings.