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Courtesy of the Times.
The woman who noticed the Conservatives were seen as the nasty party has now fallen victim to the species she identified. On Wednesday Theresa May threw her last roll by pledging to resign once her withdrawal agreement has passed. At her current rate of progress that’s a recipe for remaining as prime minister for another decade. When she does go, the forces she once identified are gathering to replace her. The melee has started. Campaign teams are being assembled and activity grids drawn up. Donors are being tapped, headquarters rented, attack lines polished and signature policies devised. The canvassing of colleagues, until now discreet, will soon break into the open and every media interview will become an audition for the top job.
But before the mathematics of politics comes the philosophy. Even an avowedly non-doctrinal party such as the Conservatives divides into the several different worldviews. Indeed, ideology has entered the soul of the modern party, to the chagrin of many members. The Tory party once travelled light, ideologically. Its elixir was its intellectual flexibility: the capacity to be protectionist in one era and liberal in another. Such shifts rarely lasted for long — they were merely pragmatic moves by a party in which belief was subordinated to the pursuit of power. The temptations of two particular doctrines have made the Tories all but ungovernable. The first is the appeal of sovereignty-based nationalism. There is a breed of Eurosceptic in the Conservative Party that loathes the European Union so much that they are not even prepared to vote to leave unless they can stick their fingers up to it as they go. Their vision of national sovereignty in a world of alliances, treaties and trade and capital flows is a century out of date and their assumption that taking back control from Europe is the answer to the problems Britain faces is simply fatuous. Yet they have got religion and cannot be reasoned with.
The second doctrinal temptation is hang-over Thatcherism. The House of Commons is full of lags in the sense that people who came to political maturity in one era then serve in another. That makes them strangely ill-equipped for relevance in the time of their prominence. The Labour leadership candidates in 2015, Jeremy Corbyn apart, sounded like visitors from the New Labour past. The low-tax, slash-regulation Tories hark even further back, to the last successful Tory political venture of the Thatcher years. The coming leadership contest will be a test of whether the Conservative Party can avoid either of these two versions of the hard stuff. The really intoxicated among them will pour a cocktail made of both elements. The candidate for the determinedly drunk is Dominic Raab who, incredibly, declared that the best plan for the government is to demand legally-binding changes to the withdrawal agreement and, if they are not forthcoming, leave the EU without a deal. He must have been asleep for the fortnight in which it became obvious that neither of these two options were feasible. Mr Raab is the last ditch candidate who loves Britain so much he thinks we could be Singapore.
Though Mr Raab does an impeccable job of diminishing himself I am loathe to join in because he is my preferred candidate to win the leadership. Speaking as someone keen to see a new party emerge in British politics, Mr Raab is, without question, my candidate. He is exactly the sort of cat-that-got-the-cream character who would repel floating voters. Non-Tories will really dislike Mr Raab who will rapidly restore the Tories to the status of the nasty party. Mr Raab is the kind of Tory who thinks that people eat at food banks because they like the menu. There is a set of Tory MPs ready to walk if his unforgiving politics were allowed to take over. And his seat of Esher in Surrey is high on the list of possible places that a third party might do well. Let’s field JK Rowling against him and be shot of him.
The main purpose of political parties in a democracy is to be one of the guard-rails. It sounds out of the temper of the times to say so, but the party structure is there to protect democracy from the hot-headed members. Leadership elections should not be plebiscites and that applies even more when Tory activists are selecting a prime minister. Changing the person at the top like this should, in my view, force a general election but it doesn’t so the task falls to Tory MPs to select two candidates who are plausible occupants of Downing Street.
That criterion ought to rule out Boris Johnson and may well do so. It is hard to think of anyone, in my political lifetime, who has wasted office more than Mr Johnson. He had such an opportunity. He had public recognition and a degree of affection. He reached parts of the political spectrum unvisited by other Tories. You cannot mint that quality: he really did have something none of the others had. All he had to do was to graft on a sense of gravity and political weight — a task that has proved entirely beyond him. He could and should have cast himself as the heir to liberal conservatism. Instead he has lost himself down the dark alley of Brexit. A disastrous spell as foreign secretary has exposed him as a charlatan who will need to be stopped.