For silly season – which this year has been far from silly so far – you need a grabby headline.
Mine this morning isn’t because I’m not playing the game. Yes, I know, apparently a ‘purge of the wets’ is underway. Well yes and no, but I’m not grabbing my raincoat just yet.
Despite a raft of policy changes over the last year, and positions taken by Kemi Badenoch there are some who insist the party is just the same party as it was exactly two years ago. Shattered, rudderless and talking right but acting left. No longer governing.
Whoever led the party out of this dire situation, the very point I decided I’d like to do this job – yes I’ve revisited that idea a number of times over the period since – had to make a change because the Conservatives had lost the trust of a large section of the electorate, and a Labour Government had been elected “probably for a decade or more” said the left leaning commentators, on the basis ‘they weren’t the Conservatives’
Reform began their now ancient and inappropriate mantra that the party was ‘dead’. Not only does that now seem wrong, and presumptive, it also feels crass as a comment.
Badenoch has made a raft of changes to the Conservative’s policy position and I’m expecting to see a raft more at this year’s Conference. She also made an announcement that raised eyebrows, and questions at the time – which was months ago – that if people wanted to stand as Conservatives candidates they would need to sign up to two of these new positions: that the UK should leave the ECHR and back scrapping targets to reach net-zero.
The party leader said this some time ago. It’s not new.
Having written an article about it recently where Kemi Badenoch laid out why she was insisting on this, another example of her changing the nature of the party, a lot of people seem to have been both surprised and a little over excited.
First comes the inevitable and inaccurate criticism from the left that now all Tories must be anti-net zero and pro abandoning Human Rights. This of course is nonsense. In the same way Keir Starmer tried to tell MPs that Kemi had said she ‘wanted a war with Iran’, and that Nick Timothy had said ‘Muslims weren’t welcome in public spaces’ – no such words were ever uttered by either.
Lord Hermer in what I suspect was a last gasp in the job of Attorney General released an odd little video where like an over animated Hobbit he proclaimed that abandoning Human Rights was abandoning ‘your rights’ nobody has actually advocated the scrapping of Human Rights.
Apparently getting rid of targets to achieve net zero by 2050 and removing the constraints Net-Zero legislation put upon getting people energy security and cheaper bills as now tantamount to scorched earth – literally.
So far, I haven’t seen a single public statement from a current Conservative MP that has complained about the change. I’ve found attempts to say “oh but they said X,Y,Z before, so clearly, they are ‘wet’” but not much more.
Claire Coutinho the shadow energy secretary has acknowledged she’s changed her mind. Nobody is saying net-zero is a terrible aim, they’ve just said it is not achievable in the existing time frame, without harming the UK economically, which even if achieved would make a one percent reduction in global emissions. Change the dynamic, sign up to the new direction, change was bound to come. That’s the message and it seems to have landed, even in doubtful minds.
Some of Labour’s more egregious outriders have tried to claim Gavin, Lord Barwell, former chief of staff to Theresa May having the whip removed is akin to the opening salvoes of an internal civil war. Even Wes Streeting tried this, in an act supremely lacking in self awareness.
Well I guess they are sensitive to this stuff since they’ve just been through one, so extraordinary that nobody, not even their opponents could have envisaged Keir Starmer, deliverer of a landslide in 2024, being removed in a coup by the former Mayor of Manchester within two years of taking office.
The insistence that Conservative candidates stick to more Conservative principles laid down by a new leader is designed to stop the risk of internal warfare, not promote it. It is born of the horrible lessons of 2019-24 where ungovernable factional infighting resulted in not the loss of one but four Conservative Prime Ministers, and the last dumped by the country.
I’ve no major problem with Gavin Barwell personally, indeed he has written for this site, but if he wanted a reaction to public criticism of the leadership and direction of travel, he’s had one. Prosper UK, has been an irritant for LOTO, partly because with no sitting MPs on board it looks, walks, and sounds like the creation of a party within a party – which I note at every juncture they themselves have sought to deny and explain they aren’t.
However the very public criticism and disagreement that Gavin has articulated has prompted a response. As the Chairman Kevin Holinrake said last night:
“The best leaders tolerate disagreement, but never disrespect”
One whip removed does not a flood of wets make. And here’s why.
The ‘army of secret liberal democrats holding the leadership back’ is a slightly manufactured trope. Those people have deemed to be ‘wet’ – and by the way being in favour of conservation, of looking after the environment is not a sign of disagreement with the current position on net-zero targets does and does not, ergo, make one a Liberal Democrat – are, as far as my checks have, gone still solidly Conservatives.
I’ve repeatedly asked people to name the members of this ghost cabal and beyond about five people who have always been on the One Nation side of the party as was, they cannot credibly do so. I’ve seen wild suggestions that such and such is clearly a ‘wet’ and had to laugh. Some of those identified have never been wet in their life!
Sir Simon Clarke, former MP, and now running Onward, jumped to the defence of his former chief of staff when she was suggested to be ‘wet’ saying she is:
“…the polar opposite of ‘wet’. Indeed she is like a Saharan breeze of dryness.”
In a bid to make mischief with this I suspect much to our opponents annoyance you’d find if you looked, as I do, that breeze is blowing around the whole Conservative party at the moment and whether candidates, or sitting MPs like it or not, they have accepted it’s here to stay.
Civil war? If there is one it’s not nearly a war, and it’s mainly civil. Because of course parties can disagree. Reform most certainly does, but as Richard Tice was overheard saying to Tim Montgomerie – who despite leaving the Conservative fold has said he:
“would have written a piece that welcomes the seriousness of Kemi B’s change process”
He actually claims it’s ‘synthetic’, I don’t. Reform need you to think that, otherwise it’s a further challenge to them.
But Tice told Tim at a recent event that ‘it was all very well for Reform to have internal disagreements but that they mustn’t be aired in public’, something he and Badenoch clearly agree on. It’s not helpful to any party, just ask Labour, or our next Prime Minister – once we’ve seen the last one leave.
The ‘purge of the wets’ will be welcomed by many, and I for one am happy to see a consistency of position being forged that is neither wet nor dry, left or right, but Conservative as defined by the current leadership. But I’m not expecting this so called purge to produce mass casualties.
The truth is almost all of them are already onboard. It’s just those outside are catching up with that fact.