When does a pre-election “chicken run” become a mass participation event for Tory MPs?
The Parkrun of politics is under way, as MPs, reeling from last week’s twin by-election trouncing, begin throwing in the towel and scouring LinkedIn for quick-change job opportunities.
It’s easy to forget that 58 Tory MPs have quit the Commons this parliament – either voluntarily or forced out by scandals. These numbers now look like a rising trend: Peter Bone unleashed the Wellingborough by-election, which saw a convincing Tory majority melt into a Labour one of 6,000, after the veteran right-winger’s departure amid allegations of bullying and sexual misconduct.
Kingswood allowed another punchy Labour candidate, Damien Egan, to seize a seat vacated by Chris Skidmore. The Tory quit partly on the grounds of his opposition to Rishi Sunak’s expansion of licences for offshore oil exploration, but also, as he put it plaintively in an earlier Commons speech, because: “My constituency of Kingswood is being formally abolished in the boundary changes and there is nowhere for me to go.”
Overall, the boundary changes are more likely to benefit Tories. But the polling woes make it harder for politicians to find a safe seat to target – even assuming that they would be selected for it. Besides the cyclical factors – after 14 years at the helm and now a fifth prime minister, a fin de siècle feeling is inevitable.
However, it is now tinged with a sense, as one departing backbencher puts it, of “existential despair” about the party’s chances. “It’s either stick around, watch Rishi get trounced and the party pitched into strife between the right and a rump of moderates – or get out there and detox.”
That mood is intensifying, as The Sunday Times reported, citing predictions that more than 100 MPs could throw in the towel if the “do not resuscitate” diagnoses takes hold and the margin of defeat for Sunak looks substantial. It’s a pincer movement of Labour holding its polling lead and energised by its by-election wins; the advance of the Reform party and prospect of Nigel Farage draining votes on the right; and the inconvenient launch of the “PopCons” grouped loosely around Liz Truss and Jacob Rees-Mogg sapping attention.
The PopCons feel like what the Momentum movement was in its day to Labour: a force that claims to want the success of the party it is allied to, but on different terms and with divergent interests. Crucially, it is also an implicit stinging critique of whoever is running the show. So Truss has channelled her frustrations about that lettuce-duration stint in No 10 into an analysis that pushes for more tax cuts and regulatory bonfires, regardless of practicalities.
They are also a muddle of ideas: Rees-Mogg is tilting at liberal technocratic elites, declaring at the launch that the “age of Davos man is over”. Lee Anderson, a fog-horn spokesman for the Red Wall seats, highlights the culture-war gap between the North of England and a caricature of southern-based institutions captured by “woke” warriors. Truss has been travelling to Asia and the US on a speech-circuit that unites hawkishness in foreign affairs with business-first policies. Occasionally, these aims collide: my colleagues at Politico revealed that Truss last year lobbied Kemi Badenoch, the Business and Trade Secretary, to expedite defence sales to China, which sat oddly with a concerted Tory-right push to toughen the UK’s stance on Beijing as a strategic threat to the the UK.
But insurgencies do not much need to worry about doctrinal consistencies when they can channel frustrations from across a wide range of conservatives. Signals that Chancellor Jeremy Hunt might now consider there to be less headroom for tax cuts in March have landed badly with many on the economic right of the party, who do not fit the “Tory nutter” mould of being overzealous on immigration or hard Brexit, but who simply find the offer – as one erstwhile admirer of Sunak puts it to me – “hugely underwhelming”.
The country has just tipped recession, albeit to a small degree, but enough to make the R word back as a powerful weapon for Labour’s Rachel Reeves, to throw at the incumbent. Expect more of the rhetoric that this is “Rishi’s recession” from Labour.
As Hunt sees it, it is a reason to hold steady, keep pushing inflationary pressures down (4 per cent is still in the pain zone for hard-pressed consumers) and defending his central claim that the Government will take no risks on inflation heading upwards again. That does, however, leave an unappetising pre-election dish for the Tories and confusion about whether the plan is now to hold tax cuts till later in the year or reduce their overall impact.
Sunak will seek to inject more fightback spirit in the next months. And perhaps for some, there is fun to be had in waging the fight to the end – it definitely makes for a spicier memoir than shaping out with six months to go. In fairness, many ministers who are still tussling with difficult jobs in the midst of government believe in hanging on in there. But the overall trend looks hard to stall: a sizeable tranche of Conservatives MPs weighing up whether this is the time to call it quits, before the electorate does it for them. The chickens are coming home to roost, one way or another.
Anne McElvoy is host of Politico’s interview podcast POWER PLAY
PopCon Tories are relishing the chaos – the future of the party is theirs
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19.02.2024
When does a pre-election “chicken run” become a mass participation event for Tory MPs?
The Parkrun of politics is under way, as MPs, reeling from last week’s twin by-election trouncing, begin throwing in the towel and scouring LinkedIn for quick-change job opportunities.
It’s easy to forget that 58 Tory MPs have quit the Commons this parliament – either voluntarily or forced out by scandals. These numbers now look like a rising trend: Peter Bone unleashed the Wellingborough by-election, which saw a convincing Tory majority melt into a Labour one of 6,000, after the veteran right-winger’s departure amid allegations of bullying and sexual misconduct.
Kingswood allowed another punchy Labour candidate, Damien Egan, to seize a seat vacated by Chris Skidmore. The Tory quit partly on the grounds of his opposition to Rishi Sunak’s expansion of licences for offshore oil exploration, but also, as he put it plaintively in an earlier Commons speech, because: “My constituency of Kingswood is being formally abolished in the boundary changes and there is nowhere for me to go.”
Overall, the boundary changes are more likely to benefit Tories. But the polling woes make it harder for politicians to find a safe seat to target – even assuming that they would be selected for it. Besides the cyclical factors – after 14........
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