Far from facing up to the mistakes of the past, too many of the Tory leadership contenders are responsible for them, says Tom Jones
And so, the race to be Conservative leader has started. Not with a bang, perhaps, but a whimper.
Tom Tugendhat’s campaign was kicked off by a spectacularly poor article by Steve Baker and Damian Green. Without a single fact or statistic offered, it largely consisted of meaningless, unevidenced waffle; calls for unity without a sense of what we’re uniting around, ranting about the dangers of ‘the hard right’ when we shed millions of votes to Reform, whilst all the time skating over our failures in government.
Priti Patel has also announced her candidacy. Her pitch is designed, according to outrider Jonathan Gullis (remember him?) to ‘unite the Conservative Party, take the fight to Starmer’s Labour, and win back the trust of voters.’ Our failure to lower immigration was the primary reason for voters switching to Reform, was in the top five reasons they switched to Labour and was even cited as the third-highest reason for 2019 Tories to switch to the Lib Dems. So it remains an open question how selecting the person responsible for creating the most liberal immigration system of all time, who as Home Secretary trebled legal migration and increased boat crossings seven and a half times, would ‘win back the trust of voters’.
Frontrunner Kemi Badenoch hasn’t formally announced her candidacy, but has already kicked off her campaign. She used her first appearance at the Shadow Cabinet to distance herself from Rishi Sunak by calling the erstwhile PM’s decision to call an early election without informing his Cabinet bordering on “unconstitutional”, saying that the D-Day blunder was “disastrous” and cost many MPs their seats, and that Craig Williams – Sunak’s Parliamentary Private Secretary, who placed a bet on the timing of the election – was a “buffoon”. She followed up this slightly jejune analysis of our historic defeat by launching a personal attack on rival Suella Braverman, alleging she was having ‘a very public nervous breakdown.’
Braverman, meanwhile, has launched her campaign – either to be leader or to join Reform, depending on the reception of her current colleagues – with a range of personal attacks on anyone who isn’t Suella Braverman.
If this is to be the tone of the campaign then we are in for a long – and well-deserved – spell in opposition. Does what is on offer so far – failing to analyse, or apologise for, our failures in government, promoting those responsible for those failures, personal infighting and headline grabbing culture war shock tactics – sound like something that is going to win back the trust of the electorate?
With a wry paraphrasing of the new, presumed leader of the Democratic Party, Angus Parsad-Wyatt noted that the Conservative leadership election is ‘a real opportunity for us to imagine what can be, unburdened by what has been.’
If we are to unburden ourselves of past failures, we must await a candidate that is correct in their analysis and honest about the reasons for said failure and, rather than responsible for what went wrong, credible to put it right. Only then can we imagine what can be.
Tom Jones is a writer and a Conservative councillor for Scotton & Lower Wensleydale