In July, the Conservative Party co-chairman Sayeeda Warsi was cleared of any wrongdoing in her expenses claims by the House of Lords Commissioner for Standards. Although David Cameron reiterated his support for Warsi at the time, he did, as my colleague George Eaton noted, leave himself the option of moving her in a September reshuffle.
Whispers that a reshuffle is imminent persist, which is presumably why Warsi makes a pre-emptive case for remaining in post in an interview with the Daily Telegraph today. She said: “If I genuinely had a choice, I would like to stay doing what I’m doing. If you look at the demographics, at where we need to be at the next election, we need more people in the North voting for us, more of what they call here ‘blue collar’ workers and I call the white working class. We need more people from urban areas voting for us, more people who are not white and more women. I play that back and think: ‘I’m a woman, I’m not white, I’m from an urban area, I’m from the North, I’m working class – I kind of fit the bill. All the groups that we’re aiming for are groups that I’m familiar with.”
That logic doesn’t cut much ice with Paul Goodman of Conservative Home, the website is that is as reliable an indicator of Tory grassroots (and backbench, for that matter) opinion as there is. Goodman writes: “If this thinking is pushed to its exteme, it follows that only working class people can make a political case to other working class people, only Muslims can do so to other Muslims and so on.” Warsi’s “segregationist logic”, he argues, “eats its own tail: under it, the Baroness would be steered away from Hindu voters, for example.”
Strong stuff. And another reason, Goodman thinks, for giving Warsi a different job (though he’s quick to insist that the other co-chairman, Andrew Feldman, ought to go too). He argues that the Tories ought to return to the practice of the past, where the party chairman was usually a “big beast” from the Commons front bench – he mentions Kenneth Baker, Chris Patten and Norman Tebbitt. His choice would be William Hague; his ConHome colleague Tim Montgomerie prefers Michael Gove.
Either way, September could be an eventful month for the Conservatives.
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