PressSplit
Bob Blackman (with paper) speaks on College Green in front of Parliament. © picture alliance / empics
The race for the next leadership of the Conservatives after their crushing election defeat promises to be amusing.
Since the momentous Brexit decision in June 2016, the once very disciplined Tories have spent at least as much time on internal party disputes as on governing the sixth largest economy in the world. Liberal conservative internationalists, right-wing law and order supporters, nationalist hardliners – the party broke up into groups and cliques that foolishly called themselves “research units” or even “families” à la Mafia. The warring camps gleefully beat each other up, eagerly encouraged by the media, which blew up every anonymously spread joke into news.
The new head of the 1922 Club, to which all the Tory backbenchers belong, thinks that this is over. There have been significantly fewer of them since the general election in early July: just 23.7 percent still wanted to vote for the oldest party in the world; its 121 seats in the House of Commons represent less than a third of the number won under Boris Johnson in 2019. 1922 boss Bob Blackman wants to discipline this more manageable group by means of “yellow cards”: Anyone caught being malicious about people from their own ranks should be publicly exposed.
The hunt for culprits will probably keep 66-year-old Blackman busy for some time – although he already has enough to do on other fronts. Blackman knows the list of two women and four men who are running to succeed Sunak. After the parade in the local party associations over the summer, interviews in the parliamentary group and speeches at the party conference in Birmingham, two will then go to the primary vote of around 150,000 paying party members. The new leader or chairperson is finally expected to be decided at the beginning of November.
Of course, the process, which will last a good three months, is also about content. Recently, for example, three former party leaders appealed to the incoming leadership not to water down the ambitious British climate goals. The trio will come up against a brick wall with the current favorite, Kemi Badenoch: The former trade and business minister wants to postpone the decarbonization of the British economy beyond the current 2050 deadline. The other right-wing hardliner in the race, former Home Secretary Priti Patel, recently even argued for a complete pause in climate policy.
The third right-winger in the race, former Secretary of State Robert Jenrick, is banking entirely on his reputation as a tough guy on asylum issues. He has been campaigning for himself for months, but remained loyal to Sunak during the election campaign, and so many from the nationalist camp who had previously supported Suella Braverman have defected to him. She said goodbye to the race with a column in the Tory house paper “Telegraph”: Since people always badmouth her, she did not want to lead the party. In reality, the twice-fired minister had no chance because she had repeatedly criticized Sunak during the election campaign. This is considered unforgivable even among the Tories, who are used to trench warfare.
In the British majority voting system, elections are won in the middle – liberal conservatives Tom Tugendhat and Melvyn Stride remind us of this iron law and are thus courting the votes of the moderates in the party. The former Foreign and Home Secretary James Cleverly, the third child of immigrants in the race and a darling of the party people as a lieutenant colonel in the reserves, is also presenting himself as a reconciler in the middle.
But will Blackman’s appeals for fairness and the threat of yellow cards bear fruit? Anyone who has read the British newspapers recently may doubt that. They are fond of reminding people of Jenrick’s unclear role in the awarding of a fraudulent multi-million dollar contract during the Covid pandemic. “Kemi is crossing a multi-lane road looking for a fight,” said one parliamentary colleague about the well-known argumentative Badenoch. Another was quoted as saying that Patel was partly responsible for the election defeat because of her liberal immigration policy: “Now she comes along like a convicted arsonist and wants to water the roses.” Happy prospects for journalists, lots of grey hairs for Blackman.
