I once pondered a career in politics but an elder statesman strongly advised me against it. I asked why. Because, he said, you are too interested in politics. Stick to journalism. A political career was not about politics, but about loyalty.
Never a truer word was spoken. As the tottering frame of Britain’s Tory party heads for collapse at the end of this parliament, it is clearly suffering death throes. Loyalty, long that party’s “secret weapon”, has deserted it. With an awesome electoral ordeal ahead, its leader Rishi Sunak had to watch colleagues and backbenchers alike attend a rally of an ultra-conservative US sect to discuss what Tories really believe, 13 years after they have supposedly been practising it.
This week’s National Conservatism conference, held at the Emmanuel Centre in central London, was blatantly a first run of a leadership contest presumed to follow next year’s general election. Speaking were the shameless home secretary, Suella Braverman, Jacob Rees-Mogg and Lord Frost among other not so closet rebels. The Tories have found their own Tribune group.
For senior figures in the party to publicise their impending defeat is bizarre. Throughout history, the Conservatives have faced the nation with a united front. Any leader seen as likely to lose was ditched, such as Harold Macmillan or Margaret Thatcher. Or they were supported with blind faith, like Edward Heath and John Major. When, under David Cameron, Brexit was the issue of the day, antagonists buckled under or left the party for Ukip.
The leaderships of Theresa May, Boris Johnson and Liz Truss destroyed this tradition of loyalty. Tory leaders would once have been longstanding friends. They would have socialised together and known each other’s strengths and weaknesses. An informal protocol would have guarded their confidentiality and commitment to each other. Only of Thatcher was this perhaps not true, but she carefully kept her dissident “wets” within her tent. John Major too had his “bastards” but he faced them down and won their public support.
Sunak as prime minister must face the toughest struggle of any since the second world war. He has inherited a nation stumbling out of a pandemic in worse shape than any in Europe. Its economy is ailing, its cost of living soaring and every public service is in disarray. The nation’s favourite state enterprise, the NHS, is in some respects facing collapse. As for the Tories’ greatest achievement in a generation, Brexit, it is gradually emerging as a serious failure, its unique selling point, lower immigration, gone into reverse. On planet Sunak, no day is a good news day.
After Johnson’s massacre of the talents, the party was left bereft of able candidates to succeed him. The cabinet is composed of ministers of whom most would never formerly have rated any government job. Only Michael Gove would have attained cabinet rank in a normal government. Sunak himself was a mere junior minister four years before entering Downing Street. He has had to learn on the job.
Nonetheless he has emerged as a competent, conscientious and, even at times, cheerful leader. Labour’s Keir Starmer has seemed uncomfortable trying to be rude to him at the dispatch box. Indeed, the chief accusation levelled at him is his loyalty to his former leaders. He must answer for all the evils of “long Johnson”, not to mention long Cameron, May and Truss.
The prime minister’s greatest handicap is the lack of an experienced team around him. Lacking experience himself, he is devoid of staff seasoned in crisis management. Sunak lacks the cabal of old friends and associates on whom leaders such as Thatcher and Tony Blair relied and with whom they could relax. The 44-year-old cabinet secretary Simon Case appears to lack the confidence of his fellow departmental chiefs. There is no one with the clout of Thatcher’s Charles Powell, Blair’s Alastair Campbell or even Johnson’s Dominic Cummings. However misguided may be the clout, it helps absorb pressure and negotiate advice.
Worst of all, Sunak has had no time: no time to weed his cabinet of duds and no time to resolve legacy nightmares not of his making. He is, or should be, haunted by fiascos over Belfast power-sharing, Brexit law revision, Post Office compensation, HS2’s costs and defects in EU trade treaties. He has no time to boost Tory fortunes in Scotland, where much of the coming election may depend.
In all this the Tories’ secret weapon is blunted and useless, tarnished by Sunak’s own disloyalty when tested to extreme in Johnson’s hour of need. The message of the NatCon rally is that the Tory hierarchy is no longer a club. Much like Labour of old, it has dissolved into policy differences that mutate into party identity groups.
To put it mildly, Sunak looks like being the best leader the Tories have got. Given the odds against him, if he stops Labour achieving an overall majority, it will be a political feat little short of sensational. He would at very least deserve another chance. But if the antics of NatCon are any guide, there is little chance of that. The Tory party looks set fair for another period of tempestuous self-destruction.
Simon Jenkins is a Guardian columnist