This morning, Suella Braverman announced that she will not be contesting the leadership contest. As a result, we are now unlikely to spend the next few months litigating her particularly trenchant analysis of how the Party ended up where it is.
It is therefore worth highlighting one part of her Daily Telegraph article which is entirely correct: Rishi Sunak’s Government was a case study in what happens when unity is made a vice:
“The reality is that we were a united party under Rishi Sunak. We MPs united to install him as PM with a coronation. Rishi never lost a vote because of Tory rebellion (save for Infected Blood). Precisely everything on Rishi’s agenda was nodded through: smoking bans, pedicabs, tax rises, Windsor framework and even the misguided early general election.”
She goes on: “Compare that to the paralysis that crippled Theresa May’s government. Now that was division. One moral of this story is that so many colleagues were lost at the altar of unity. Not because of occasional comment from backbenchers.” Readers may remember our making a similar case last month – although in that instance, it was precisely to warn against any shotgun marriage to Reform UK.
But the point applies equally to divisions within the Conservative Party. Yes, it is almost axiomatic that divided parties do not win. But it does not follow that united parties do: the vital extra variable is on what terms unity is secured. Successful leaders, be they Tony Blair or Margaret Thatcher, offered a clear sense of direction and purpose. Unsuccessful ones end up paralysed, unable to advance in any direction without imperilling the façade of a united party.
Kemi Badenoch, launching her own campaign in the Times today, also takes up this line of attack:
“But there is a bigger question of what it means to be a conservative today. If there wasn’t, the Reform party would not exist. It is not enough to call for “unity to win”. We need to ask ourselves, what are we uniting around? What are we winning for?”
All this presents an interesting contrast with the candidates running from the more One-Nation side of things. James Cleverly, Mel Stride, and Tom Tugendhat have all sought to downplay the ideological dimension of the contest; Badenoch’s dig at prioritising unity might be seen as a swipe at Cleverly, but her op-ed contrasts most sharply with Tugendhat’s dubious claim that Tories are already united on every substantive policy issue.
This does not, of course, mean that the question of competence isn’t important, either in analysing the Party’s failures in office or, as our columnist John Oxley argues, selecting a candidate with the skills to make a success of opposition. But in some quarters this seems to have turned into a very strange belief that competence and ideology (or values, ideas, whatever) are completely separable. For example:
As a criticism of Tugendhat, this makes no sense. Competence is a question of means, not ends; the only way to have a debate purely or even primarily on competence is if everyone involved is agreed on what they were trying to do, i.e. exactly the frame Tugendhat is trying to sell.
Or put another way: one can only attack the Tories purely on competence if one things they were entirely correct in their diagnosis and prescription for the country, and merely failed to execute it. Is that Ian Dunt’s view? It doesn’t seem likely to be Dunt’s view, nor the view of most commentators sternly warning the Party against an ideological contest.
Even then, it’s tricky. What does ‘losing on competence’ mean when it comes to, say, immigration? That the Party should have been much more effective in living up to its rhetoric and getting net inflows down? Or taxation: should the Conservatives have taken a much more muscular approach to controlling public spending, in order to walk-the-walk on their low-tax talk?
Perhaps. But both of those sounds very much like “we weren’t Tory enough”. Awkwardly for the Party’s progressive critics, any narrow focus on its competence in office means focusing on how it acted, not how it spoke – and with the exception of the Rwanda Scheme, that largely comprised going with the flow on tax, spending, construction, health, and everything else that mattered.
It would obviously be possible for the debate to go too far in the other direction; three months of different factions shouting at each other about which represented ‘real conservatives’ would help nobody but Labour.
Yet there is no escaping the need for the Conservative Party to update its ideas. Members deserve better than a debate between the classic prescriptions of 1975 and the modernising wisdom of… 2005. The Britain of 2025 presents fresh problems and a fresh political and electoral landscape – and demands fresh answers from any party that seeks to govern it.