If you’re a Tory MP agonising about how to vote today, ask yourself one question. Which candidate will convince voters that the Conservatives are serious about growth?
Everything else, I’m afraid, is secondary. If we don’t win the next election, it doesn’t matter where our leader stands on leaving the ECHR, reversing the tax on school fees, or reoccupying the Chagos Islands.
Culture wars can be important, even enjoyable. But for our purposes, they are beside the point. What the Tory leader thinks about trans rights or colonial apologies might matter in itself, but it will shift few votes in marginal seats.
Kemi Badenoch’s passion and conviction, Robert Jenrick’s grit and cleverness, James Cleverly’s wit and likeability – all these are assets. None will, of itself, win us the election.
We should not fret about the perennial pollsters’ obsession with which candidate people would “most like to have a pint with”. By the next election, being able to afford to go to the pub at all will be a far more pressing issue.
Centre-Right parties generally win, not because they are seen as cuddly, but because they are seen as efficient. Leftists might be thought to care more about the poor, but they are also often thought to be cack-handed imbeciles. Rightists, by contrast, may be seen as hard-hearted, but they are also seen as hard-headed.
I don’t think either caricature is fair, but that’s not the point. Labour won because the Tories, after the lockdown and the Kwasi Kwarteng Budget, were no longer seen as practical (if grim-faced) hommes d’affaires. Instead, they found themselves in the cataclysmic position of being seen as both heartless and incompetent and began losing support on both flanks.
When they tacked Left, they ceded ground to Reform without gaining any from the Liberal Democrats. When they tacked Right, they pushed voters to the LibDems without any compensating gains from the Faragistes.
Perhaps the Left-Right axis is the wrong way to look at things. Every piece of advice I have read is a variant of “Why the Tories Must Resist a Move to the Left/Right [delete as appropriate]”. None of these pieces is surprising. The by-line tells you whether the writer will urge a shift Leftwards (“resist the siren calls of Reform”, “talk to the electorate not yourselves”, “remember that elections are won in the Centre”) or Rightwards (“people did not vote for higher tax or more immigration”, “clear blue water”, “show some principle”).
I happen to think the ideological distance among the three remaining candidates is overstated. These elections always exaggerate differences. I have argued before that Rishi Sunak’s reputation for wetness stems largely from the 2022 leadership vote. Commentators talk as if we were heading for a run-off between Mark Francois and Simon Hoare. All six original contenders were fairly tightly grouped on policy, the remaining three even more so.
No, the way back for the Tories does not involve a jump to the Left or a step to the Rai-ai-ai-ight. It involves exuding economic competence. It involves convincing voters that, unlike Labour, we have a serious recovery plan.
Think of my friend Pierre Poilievre, the brilliant leader of the Canadian Conservatives, now more than 20 points ahead in the polls. He comes from the Right of his party – his background was in Reform, not the pre-merger Tories – but he does not campaign on culture war issues. Rather, he sticks to his central message of common sense economics, more housebuilding, lower taxes, sound money, and a dash of tougher policing.
So, for all you MPs who keep assuring me that you read this column, who is the British Poilievre? Don’t worry about the opinion polls. As David Ogilvy, the father of advertising, put it more than 60 years ago, “The problem with market research is that people don’t think how they feel, they don’t say what they think, and they don’t do what they say.”
Don’t worry, either, about surveys of party members. They, too, are poor guides at this stage.
Don’t worry about what job you might be offered. Except for Party Chairman and Chief Whip, there are no meaningful jobs in Opposition. With 121 MPs, the challenge will be finding enough people willing to man the front bench.
And don’t worry about picking the winner. Unless you were in at the very start of someone’s leadership campaign, you have already missed that bus. (I would, though, urge the eventual winner to take a leaf out of David Cameron’s book. After the 2005 contest, the new Tory leader asked each of his defeated rivals – David Davis, Liam Fox, and Kenneth Clarke – to recommend the ablest of his lieutenants from the recent campaign for inclusion in the Shadow Cabinet.)
Finally, don’t worry about whom you would most like to invite to Sunday lunch, or have as an in-law, or any other pollster’s formulation. The question that matters is whom you would trust to invest your savings.
Even that is not an easy decision. But, given the speed of Labour’s collapse, it is the key question. Get it right and our recovery could begin immediately.