Andrew Gilligan is a writer and former No10 adviser.
Johnny Mercer, the former Plymouth Moor View MP and veterans’ minister, has published a new book about why British politics does not work – complete with front cover endorsements from Alastair Campbell (“remarkable, deeply personal, moving and funny”) and Rory Stewart (“an extraordinary piece of writing by an extraordinary man.”)
The choice of those two celebrities perhaps says something about Mercer’s relationship with the Conservative Party, or his political judgment, or both.
But the book does give us an opportunity to address one of the questions to which many Tory MPs in the last parliament got the wrong answer. Does being a rampant, media-crazed egomaniac help you win?
We all became terribly familiar with them on TV and in the newspapers: MPs obsessed with the spotlight and publicly revelling in their ability to cause trouble for the party in whose name they had all been elected.
There was Mark Francois, with his statement to camera about what he called the “five families,” a Mafia reference to the various factions on the Tory right, refusing to support Rishi Sunak’s Rwanda bill. (The coinage was not Francois’ own, but his willingness to embrace it on TV was typical of the melodrama of the last parliament which voters hated so much.) Mercer’s book goes into exhausting detail about the many scraps he got into with the government, the whips and so on.
Alas, those MPs imagining that their media profiles would be noticed and rewarded by the voters were disabused on election day, when people saw only the brand they had helped destroy.
The national swing against the Conservative Party was 19.9 per cent. Mercer did worse – suffering a 20.8 per cent swing against him. Another rentaquote MP, Michael Fabricant, suffered a 22.4 per cent swing. Francois did worse still, with a 30.6 per cent swing – though his seat was previously so safe, with the Tories getting almost three-quarters of the vote in 2019, that he held on. (There were one or two exceptions: Steve Baker, the omnipresent Brexit conscience, suffered a lower-than-average swing against him.)
In the 1997 election, another, if somewhat smaller, Tory disaster, any number of MPs who had rebelled against John Major or achieved new hospitals for their patches and expected the electorate to remember and thank them for this learned that the party label was all, and that the chaos of that time swept them indiscriminately away.
The lesson is clear: a little like the armed forces, you can survive in politics only as a team, not as individuals. Mercer and Francois, despite both having served in the Army (the reserves in Francois’ case), forgot this.
Teamwork goes both ways, of course. Life as a backbencher is often difficult, lonely and unsatisfying, and if your party is in government it certainly doesn’t feel like a team. You are held responsible for decisions in which you had no part, and though adjacent to power you are almost entirely excluded from it. We were terrible at keeping people informed: little was more infuriating for colleagues than learning about some government announcement affecting their patch from the media, or their Labour-controlled council. Pre-briefing was difficult because MPs would leak, in one case before the meeting (a Teams call) had even finished, but one-to-one briefings can reduce that risk. We had to work with councils and mayors, but we didn’t do enough to find a place for our own colleagues in the local decision making process.
In opposition, it is lot easier. The stakes are lower and the parliamentary party is small enough that everyone who wants one could be given some sort of role. Kemi Badenoch’s claim that Tory MPs now “like each other” may be a bit of a stretch – not everything about politics has changed. But the importance of discipline does appear to have been learned by the diminished remnants of the parliamentary party.
You might even say things are too quiet. The position for Conservatives is still, objectively, terrible. The current polling average has us six points below the 2024 election result, the worst in history, having more or less flatlined for the last year and a half. Why aren’t people more worried?
But I think I’d still rather have this than the endless Johnny Mercer and Mark Francois Show.