Forget Britain, this Conservative Party can’t even govern its own MPs

The Tory party is a hot mess: self-absorbed and self-destructive. Its MPs look like they need not just a spell in opposition to recuperate but also several months in what will be politely referred to as a “spa” (a spa with Xanax on tap and bars at the windows).

It doesn’t have to be this way; a slim shot at re-election exists. Yet rather than give Rishi Sunak a chance to prove himself to the public, some Tories are working themselves into a lather of drama queenery not seen since the 1990s. 

Boris leaves Parliament with a resignation letter written in the form of a cleverly quilled column, demanding to know why Sunak hasn’t cut taxes, scored a US trade deal or – odd one, this – done more for animals. He takes two MPs with him, triggering three by-elections that will be a waste of energy (not to say money) and can only humiliate the PM further – while hinting at a later return to politics, like de Gaulle or Peron. I am leaving Parliament “for now”, wrote Boris. Much as Prince Harry will not be talking about himself for now.

It would be utterly wrong to pin every problem on Boris. This charismatic, one-in-a-million politician won a historic landslide in 2019, laying the groundwork for a new Brexit coalition. The voters did not kick him out of No 10; cowardly-custard MPs did, egged on by Twitter, and last week a kangaroo court made it virtually impossible for him to stay in the Commons. To add insult to injury, Rishi is accused of vetoing some of the peerages on his honours list – a list so Roman in its shameless promotion of friends and allies that I was surprised it didn’t include a favourite horse.

No 10 denies issuing a veto. The anti-Boris camp points out that the Privileges Committee didn’t have the power to boot him out of Parliament, only to recommend suspension – thus BoJo must have calculated that he couldn’t win the subsequent Commons division or the by-election it was likely to trigger. 

It’s a pity he didn’t brave it out. There’s dignity in putting your reputation up for the vote; honour in a well-taken defeat. But people don’t do that sort of thing anymore. One prominent MP, in a philosophical mood, told me that Boris’s behaviour is a comment on the age of ego: when religion and ideology are dead, the self fills the vacuum. It’s tempting, warn some, to project a battle of ideas on to what is really court politics, like the Medici versus the Albizzi, attaching themselves to other people’s causes for momentary personal gain. Boris leaves the stage as an angry Thatcherite, but tax hikes happened under his watch, as did net zero and the Northern Ireland Protocol.

Others would counter that the issue with Boris wasn’t an absence of ideology but its excess, that Brexit – like Thatcherism before it – injected a dose of dogma into a host party that incubated it for a while, then rejected it. After all, isn’t Conservatism supposed to be a bulwark against radical populism? 

Brexit did real trauma to the Tory ruling class compelled to endure it: think of the MPs who resigned or defected, or the grandees, like Lord Heseltine, who let it be known they would vote for a different party. While pollsters obsess about the shift from Labour to Tory oop north, down south many Tories are legitimately worried they’ll lose to the Lib Dems. Realignments cut two ways.

Take my home seat, Sevenoaks, which was so reactionary when I was at school that I called it the “Alabama of England”. The town’s culture has been transformed by arrivals from London and middle-class rejection of Brexit. Today, a pride flag flies over the cricket ground. The Tories were wiped out in the locals; one area they survived in previously voted Labour. 

How do you account for the loyalty of working-class voters, I asked a local activist? “They love Brexit and Boris,” came the reply. So the Conservatives were damned with Johnson in the Commons but they might be damned now they’ve lost him. For too long, they failed to make a choice either way, which probably isn’t an indictment of philosophical confusion but simple loss of character. Rather than ride out partygate – as their forebears did Suez or the 1980s recession – MPs decided to dump Boris. Not swiftly, with something approaching courage, but cautiously and cynically, with an eye always to personal gain. Just over a day after Johnson made him chancellor, Nadhim Zahawi called for him to resign. Three months later, he urged him to run against Rishi as “Boris 2.0”.

This shambles wasn’t a Boris-era one-off; it was the most melodramatic manifestation of a new normal. The Tories humiliated Theresa May repeatedly in the House yet didn’t have the guts to dislodge her. They cheered Liz Truss’s Budget, then booted her out in a Latin American-style coup (minus the compensations of marching bands and nice uniforms).  

During one of the umpteen votes on Boris’s leadership, a minister wearily said to me, “Why are we wasting time doing this?” Oh, I could talk for hours about the decline of the officer class, the weakening of the whips and the disharmony of a nation of ragged individuals, but it’s faster to point to the example of Dehenna Davison MP – a very nice, very talented woman elected in 2019 and already a minister of state. She has announced that she is leaving politics (nothing to do with Boris), submitting her own letter that reads as if, after a lifetime on the benches, she has rendered great service to the nation and wants to make the most of what time she has left. Dehenna is 29 years old. How do you govern a party of Dehennas? How does that party then govern the nation?

For the handful of Tory MPs who do intend to stay and fight the next election, you need to understand that the only path to victory, or survival, is unity. There are glimmers of hope. The economy is not as bad as feared and the small boats plan seems to be having effect. 

Rishi is your greatest asset. He might sound like a head prefect, but he’s pulled off a number of deals – the Windsor Framework, the Atlantic Declaration – that suggest he can get things done, and with Labour far ahead but widely mistrusted, the public might give him a second look.

He could be John Major in 1992: a surprise, come-from-behind winner. Or he could be John Major in 1997, a loser at war with his own party. Let us know what you plan to do.