Was Adam Afriyie stitched up as a warning to other would-be Tory rebels?

Tory MPs are in no hurry to dismiss the possibility that Downing Street leaked the story to expose a small rebel cell early in its development.

By Rafael Behr

There is no chance of Adam Afriyie, the Conservative MP for Windsor, leading his party this side of a general election. There wasn’t much chance of him ever leading it before yesterday’s papers reported a nascent plot to line him up as David Cameron’s successor/usurper. Now that the plot’s bolt is prematurely shot that chance has shrunk to somewhere in the region of zilch.

So what is going on? As I wrote in my column last week, there is no shortage of resentment against Cameron in the Tory party. The underlying causes of that seething unrest have not gone away despite a burst of loyal exuberance following the promise of a referendum on Britain’s European Union membership.

There is a small and noisy cohort of Conservative MPs – I call them The Implacables – who are effectively in opposition already. They seem to want to accelerate the party’s defeat in the next election in order to provoke a crisis that would engulf the whole Cameroon “modernising” enterprise. They might then seize control and steer the Tories towards what they see as a more authentic Conservative agenda. In this respect, The Tory Implacables are to the right what Bennite ultras once were to Labour and the left – chasing ideological purity over electability and hating moderates on their own side with more vigour and passion than they hate the party opposite. They seem to relish the purgative potential of a leadership meltdown.

Even so, it seems unlikely any subscriber to that tendency would be so inept as to brief a couple of Sunday newspapers about their plans to unseat the Prime Minister and replace him with an MP of whom no-one outside Westminster (or his own constituency) has heard. If there was any kind of movement behind Adam Afriyie, I very much doubt it wanted its manoeuvres splashed all over the Mail on Sunday; still less at the end of a week when the Tory party was trying to make a big show of loyalty and was revelling in the perceived triumph of Cameron’s Big Europe Speech ™.

The net effect of the publicity was to make the plotters look like a small, ridiculous fanatical sect and to invite opprobrium from the overwhelming majority of Tories, which was I suspect the purpose of placing those stories in the papers. The source was, in other words, not Afriyie’s “friends” but quite the opposite. It was a device to expose a small rebel cell early on in its development and at a time when the Prime Minister is strong in order to stifle it and flush out any sympathisers. Perhaps that sounds like an over-elaborate conspiracy theory. Cock-up and ineptitude are usually the safest explanation for any rash-looking action in politics. Still, Tories I have spoken to today are in no hurry to dismiss the possibility that Afriyie’s head has, metaphorically speaking, been stuck on a spike outside Downing Street as a warning to others.