Lee David Evans is the John Ramsden Fellow at the Mile End Institute, Queen Mary, University of London.
Graham Brady, the Chairman of the 1922 Committee, has said out loud what many Conservatives have been saying in private: the party’s leadership rules are not working.
The Committee’s longest-serving chairman has directed his ire at the way the people who choose the leader (members) are different from those who have the power to remove him or her (MPs). This division of labour risks producing leaders who lack sufficient support from their colleagues in Parliament. With Conservative MPs having lost confidence in two of the four leaders chosen by members before they even fought a general election (Iain Duncan Smith and Liz Truss), he has a point.
Brady’s solution is to revert back to the pre-1998 leadership rules when the party is in office, with MPs alone determining who leads the party. In opposition, when the leader still needs the support of MPs but the confidence of the government is not so closely tied up with it, he appears happy for the current system to stand.
There’s only one problem, which Brady admits himself: “it will never happen”. He is probably right. According to the 1998 Conservative Party Constitution, such a change would require the approval of the Constitutional College of the party, comprising MPs, senior peers and key members of the voluntary party. What’s more, it would need to command two-thirds support among MPs and senior activists.
It’s a high bar. Michael Howard tried to reform the leadership rules in the aftermath of the 2005 general election and came up against the same problem; although a majority of the constitutional college supported diluting the role of members, there was insufficient support from the voluntary party.
Some party members will, undoubtedly, feel aggrieved at copping the blame for recent leadership tumult. After all, members are only ever choosing from a shortlist given to them by MPs. It may have been a mistake for members to vote for Liz Truss in the summer of 2022, but it was MPs who put her through to the final two – and at the final count, more MPs said they would vote for her than for Rishi Sunak. And so there is cause to doubt whether Brady’s reform would improve who the party chooses to lead it, although it would almost certainly make MPs feel more tightly bound to the leaders they, and they alone, choose.
There is another, simpler way that the party leadership rules could be improved: raising the threshold for being a candidate. Historically, the number of MP nominations required to contest a leadership election has been as low as two and as high as 100, although in recent, normal contests (not October 2022) it has hovered around 8-20.
If the 1922 Committee, in agreement with the party board, increased the number to a third of MPs (currently 115) it would still mean two MPs could go forward to the members’ ballot, but they would do so commanding significant support from their colleagues in parliament.
Raising the threshold would address two major problems in leadership elections today: too many candidates and too many preferences. In recent contests, unlikely leaders with little to no chance of winning have entered the contest in the hope of garnering sufficient support to barter with the leading candidates later on.
This has led to a swelling of candidates. Whereas only three candidates stood in the contest to replace Margaret Thatcher in 1990 and five to replace John Major in 1997, fast forward a couple of decades and a remarkable ten candidates starred in the 2019 contest and eight in the summer of 2022.
Having such a wide field creates the second problem: too many preferences. This isn’t dissimilar to the critique conservatives make of many PR electoral systems; by the time the winning candidates are chosen, they are typically relying on the second, third, and perhaps even fourth preferences of voters.
Truss secured just 14 per cent backing in the first round two years ago, meaning the 31.6 per cent she won on the fifth and final round, still less than a third of the parliamentary party, mostly came from MPs who originally favoured someone else. And yet she went on to lead the party.
Lifting the nomination threshold cannot guarantee stability at the top. But that Duncan Smith and Truss were both ejected as leader before they fought an election, having failed to win a third of MPs backing at any stage of the Parliamentary balloting, is unsurprising. Nor is the fact that the two leaders chosen by members who did lead the party into an election, David Cameron and Boris Johnson, did.
There are risks involved in this reform. What if no candidate achieved the required nominations? An embarrassing second nomination window might begin, or an extension of the deadline until someone did achieve the required support. Or what if only one candidate was nominated?
Surely, as now and most recently in October 2022, they would automatically become leader, but a series of leadership contests in which members were frozen out of the choice could provoke a backlash from the grassroots. These are not insignificant problems, but they are easier to tackle than regularly electing (and defenestrating) the wrong leader.
MPs, members, and readers of this site may doubt whether raising the threshold is the right way forward. But we should be in no doubt that Brady is right when he says that there are issues with the current leadership rules.
Since they were introduced just over a quarter of a century ago, six leaders have come and gone and, excluding Cameron, they have averaged just 768 days as leader – just over two years. It’s an unsustainable churn for a party that has long prized itself on unity and stability.
With his remarks, Brady has, I hope, begun a fruitful debate about what reformed rules could look like. The future of the party and the country depends upon its outcome.
Lee David Evans is the John Ramsden Fellow at the Mile End Institute, Queen Mary, University of London.
Graham Brady, the Chairman of the 1922 Committee, has said out loud what many Conservatives have been saying in private: the party’s leadership rules are not working.
The Committee’s longest-serving chairman has directed his ire at the way the people who choose the leader (members) are different from those who have the power to remove him or her (MPs). This division of labour risks producing leaders who lack sufficient support from their colleagues in Parliament. With Conservative MPs having lost confidence in two of the four leaders chosen by members before they even fought a general election (Iain Duncan Smith and Liz Truss), he has a point.
Brady’s solution is to revert back to the pre-1998 leadership rules when the party is in office, with MPs alone determining who leads the party. In opposition, when the leader still needs the support of MPs but the confidence of the government is not so closely tied up with it, he appears happy for the current system to stand.
There’s only one problem, which Brady admits himself: “it will never happen”. He is probably right. According to the 1998 Conservative Party Constitution, such a change would require the approval of the Constitutional College of the party, comprising MPs, senior peers and key members of the voluntary party. What’s more, it would need to command two-thirds support among MPs and senior activists.
It’s a high bar. Michael Howard tried to reform the leadership rules in the aftermath of the 2005 general election and came up against the same problem; although a majority of the constitutional college supported diluting the role of members, there was insufficient support from the voluntary party.
Some party members will, undoubtedly, feel aggrieved at copping the blame for recent leadership tumult. After all, members are only ever choosing from a shortlist given to them by MPs. It may have been a mistake for members to vote for Liz Truss in the summer of 2022, but it was MPs who put her through to the final two – and at the final count, more MPs said they would vote for her than for Rishi Sunak. And so there is cause to doubt whether Brady’s reform would improve who the party chooses to lead it, although it would almost certainly make MPs feel more tightly bound to the leaders they, and they alone, choose.
There is another, simpler way that the party leadership rules could be improved: raising the threshold for being a candidate. Historically, the number of MP nominations required to contest a leadership election has been as low as two and as high as 100, although in recent, normal contests (not October 2022) it has hovered around 8-20.
If the 1922 Committee, in agreement with the party board, increased the number to a third of MPs (currently 115) it would still mean two MPs could go forward to the members’ ballot, but they would do so commanding significant support from their colleagues in parliament.
Raising the threshold would address two major problems in leadership elections today: too many candidates and too many preferences. In recent contests, unlikely leaders with little to no chance of winning have entered the contest in the hope of garnering sufficient support to barter with the leading candidates later on.
This has led to a swelling of candidates. Whereas only three candidates stood in the contest to replace Margaret Thatcher in 1990 and five to replace John Major in 1997, fast forward a couple of decades and a remarkable ten candidates starred in the 2019 contest and eight in the summer of 2022.
Having such a wide field creates the second problem: too many preferences. This isn’t dissimilar to the critique conservatives make of many PR electoral systems; by the time the winning candidates are chosen, they are typically relying on the second, third, and perhaps even fourth preferences of voters.
Truss secured just 14 per cent backing in the first round two years ago, meaning the 31.6 per cent she won on the fifth and final round, still less than a third of the parliamentary party, mostly came from MPs who originally favoured someone else. And yet she went on to lead the party.
Lifting the nomination threshold cannot guarantee stability at the top. But that Duncan Smith and Truss were both ejected as leader before they fought an election, having failed to win a third of MPs backing at any stage of the Parliamentary balloting, is unsurprising. Nor is the fact that the two leaders chosen by members who did lead the party into an election, David Cameron and Boris Johnson, did.
There are risks involved in this reform. What if no candidate achieved the required nominations? An embarrassing second nomination window might begin, or an extension of the deadline until someone did achieve the required support. Or what if only one candidate was nominated?
Surely, as now and most recently in October 2022, they would automatically become leader, but a series of leadership contests in which members were frozen out of the choice could provoke a backlash from the grassroots. These are not insignificant problems, but they are easier to tackle than regularly electing (and defenestrating) the wrong leader.
MPs, members, and readers of this site may doubt whether raising the threshold is the right way forward. But we should be in no doubt that Brady is right when he says that there are issues with the current leadership rules.
Since they were introduced just over a quarter of a century ago, six leaders have come and gone and, excluding Cameron, they have averaged just 768 days as leader – just over two years. It’s an unsustainable churn for a party that has long prized itself on unity and stability.
With his remarks, Brady has, I hope, begun a fruitful debate about what reformed rules could look like. The future of the party and the country depends upon its outcome.