I have some sympathy for Bob Blackman, the chair of the 1922 Committee of backbench Tory MPs and who will play a major role in shaping the contest to replace Rishi Sunak. Leadership contests are always vicious affairs, but the circumstances of this one lend themselves to particularly bitter fight: a historic victory that within five years had disintegrated into a historic defeat, after two chaotic changes of leader mid-parliament and the annihilation of the Conservative voter base.
As I pointed out after the election, you can now cross the length and breadth of England and Wales without setting foot in a Conservative constituency. Some of the safest “Blue Wall” seats turned Labour red or Lib Dem yellow. Reform is snapping at the Tories’ heels to become the party of the right. The Conservative Party is short of not just MPs, but of money, energy and enthusiasm across the wider ecosystem, from local associations upwards. The last thing the party needs now is to turn on itself, with leadership contenders tearing into each other as they attempt to making it to the top.
Hence the introduction of a “yellow card” system. Blackman has explained that, in order to keep the contest “clean”, there will be a rule against candidates briefing against each other. If they engage in “backbiting and attacking colleagues”, he warned last night as the six nominees were confirmed, “then I will get involved, obviously, to warn them and if necessary”.
It’s a lovely idea – and who knows, maybe it will make the candidates and their champions think twice before trashing their rivals. I doubt it, though.
For a start, on a practical level it’s hard to see how this card system is going to work. The next month with be dominated by the six candidates – Kemi Badenoch, James Cleverly, Robert Jenrick, Tom Tugendhat, Priti Patel and Mel Stride – travelling the country to make their case, before MPs get the chance to start voting in September. There will be hustings, especially around the Conservative Party Conference in Birmingham, where they will get to face off in front of members and the media. Is the suggestion that they steer clear of criticising each other’s records and ideas? In which case, what’s the point?
If Blackman is referring instead to the briefings from mysterious unnamed “sources” that became the constant background music of the last few years of Tory psychodrama, that’s another matter. Speak to Conservative MPs past and present and you’ll get a range of assessments of each of the candidates’ weaknesses – from laziness and arrogance to blind opportunism and wilful ignorance. You can see why the 1922 Committee might want to avoid this kind of insult-fest, especially as some of the non-victorious contenders are all but certain to end up on the new leader’s shadow frontbench.
But if it were possible to stop anonymous briefings to journalists simply by wishing them away, Rishi Sunak would have had much an easier time of it. The point about anonymous briefings is that they are just that: anonymous. Blackman cannot wave a magic wand and prevent Tories from firing off WhatsApp messages lobby hacks saying what they really think of the candidates, and he certainly can’t stop journalists from printing what they hear. The vague threat of sanctions doesn’t mean much when it’s impossible to know who was responsible for briefing what.
The biggest problem though is with the contest itself. Each of the six candidates has frontbench government experience under at least one of the last five Conservative prime ministers. That means they all have a reason to try to seize the narrative of why their party lost so badly, and minimise their own role in that defeat. Answering that question isn’t just an academic exercise – it’s at the core of this leadership contest. Ultimately, Tory MPs and members will be picking the leader they think can best explain the failure and offer a solution.
It’s virtually impossible for that debate to play out without starting to toss blame around for where things went wrong. With the rise of Reform being a particular worry, immigration is set to be the main topic of contention. You can already see the battlelines forming. Jenrick, who has reinvented himself from the man who was immigration minister in Sunak’s cabinet, has put out a slick video where he puts ending mass migration and ensuring “anyone who comes here illegally must be deported within days” at the centre of his campaign. He is running against two former home secretaries, one of whom – Patel – thought up the Rwanda plan in the first place, the other of whom – Cleverly – is reported to have called it “batshit”. If none of these people can be hauled over the coals for their past positions, how is that debate meant to play out?
You could no doubt argue that it’s perfectly possible to robustly interrogate a rival’s position without indulging in “backbiting” and “attacking”. But the details of the contest that Blackman agreed to makes it virtually guaranteed this will get nasty. This contest is going to be long. For the first month, there will be no voting at all. The candidates will have to fight to keep up momentum and stay relevant, in a media landscape where attention has quite naturally turned to the party that is actually in government. Desperate people have a tendency to say incendiary things to get noticed (just look at Suella Braverman). A shorter timetable might have minimised the damage – as it is, escalating viciousness is virtually baked in.
“Unity”, of course, is going to be the big watchword. Jenrick claims there is “a desire for national unity, not division”; “it is time to put unity before personal vendetta,” says Patel; “we don’t have the luxury of ill discipline or disunity,” according to Cleverly. Stride has pitched himself as the unity candidate, a term previous used of Tugendhat. Only Badenoch is backing the unity trend, arguing that “it is not enough to call for ‘unity to win’. We need to ask ourselves, what are we uniting around?”
Given how many radically different policy positions the Tory Party contorted itself into throughout its 14 years in government, she has a point.
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