Can Tory MPs grasp that the public is desperate for them to break the mould?
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After today’s further round in the Conservative party leadership contest, MPs winnowed the contestants down to five. Rishi Sunak received 101 votes, Penny Mordaunt 83, Liz Truss 64, Kemi Badenoch 49 and Tom Tugendhat 32. Suella Braverman was eliminated.
Frantic horse-trading is going on as the five survivors attempt to boost their numbers.
Since Tugendhat lost five votes between the last two rounds, it’s a fair bet that he’ll be the next to bite the dust. Since Sunak is streets ahead of all the rest, it’s a fair bet that he’ll be one of the two candidates in the final run-off to be decided by Tory party members.
If so, then the fight for the second of those places in the final is between Mordaunt, Truss and Badenoch.
I have written here and here why I believe Mordaunt would be a disaster, Truss inadequate and Badenoch the only candidate who would address the country’s deepest and most important challenge — to fight and defeat those who are trying to destroy British identity, cohesion and core values.
But as Conservative MPs decide between these candidates, it’s like that many will fall back on the tired old thinking that has brought the party to its current state of existential confusion and exhaustion.
You can just see many of them squinting at Truss and Mordaunt and deciding that yes, these are both substantial women who remind them of their own wives/mothers/nannies and who therefore fit their mental image of a leader. And heaven help us, they also remind them of their lost leader Margaret Thatcher (whose matricide at the hands of the party still traumatises them), an image that Truss certainly has tried to cultivate. They look like they’ve been around the political block, and therefore each is likely to be a safe pair of hands.
And yes, they have indeed been round the block — which is one reason why they should not be elected. They represent a political establishment which has been tried and tried and tried, and found wanting.
But when these MPs look at Badenoch, what are they likely to be seeing? They’ll see someone who doesn’t fit their mental image of a woman leader. She doesn’t look like their wives/mothers/nannies. She looks like she is — a young, smart, fresh face who busts the mould of stale, defeated, vacuous, amoral Toryism because she is actually a true conservative.
She doesn’t think that conservatism (heaven help us) consists of tax cuts. She is someone who really does get it, really does understand what of priceless value in British culture is now desperately at risk and needs to be conserved, defended and protected, and what are the destructive forces that need to be seen off. And as Michael Gove observed, she doesn’t do bulls**t. She seems to be a straightforward person.
But these Tory MPs are likely to think she’s too much of a risk for precisely that reason. They’ll flinch at her views on transgender or Net Zero or “white privilege” because they’re too frightened themselves to challenge these noxious orthodoxies even in their own minds. They’ll think Badenoch is too outspoken to keep them all safe from the barbs and slingshots of the Guardian and the BBC.
They’ll think above all that she’s too young, too inexperienced, too slight, too untried because she’s only ever been a junior minister. This is rubbish. As I observed previously, one Tony Blair had no ministerial experience at all when he became prime minister and turned into one of the most successful election-winners in Labour party history.
He caught people’s imagination precisely because he so clearly represented a decisive break with the political establishment which a disillusioned electorate felt had failed them so badly. He was young, he was slight, he played a Fender Stratocaster electric guitar. He certainly didn’t fit the image of a party leader. But crucially, he gave people the impression that he was on their side, that he shared their concerns and understood how the establishment had failed them by trashing those concerns.
In a very different part of the political forest, that was exactly why Boris Johnson became prime minster, won over the “Red Wall” and delivered an election victory with an 80-seat majority. With the political establishment not only failing the electorate but threatening to betray it over Brexit, Johnson’s genius was not only to deliver what the public had voted for by taking the UK out of the EU but to make them believe that he spoke their language and would see them right in other ways too.
They lost faith in him when they decided that he wasn’t actually interested in their concerns at all, only in maintaining his own grip on power. He degenerated in their eyes into just another part of the great political cross-party blob that waffled on about equality and levelling up while illegal migrants poured in across the English Channel, public services disintegrated, children with acute psychological problems were sent off to be mutilated and people could no longer afford to heat their homes because the prime minister was too busy saving the planet from a computer-simulated fantasy of apocalypse now.
And what those Tory MPs now making their choice of leader need to grasp is that the choice they are actually making is between telling the electorate they’re going to get more of what so turned them off the Tory party, or telling them that they’re going to get someone who will turn it into a party that really is on their side — because that’s exactly where she is, too.
If they have the intelligence to understand that what went wrong wasn’t Boris Johnson but the party that produced him — and why it did so; if they have the insight to realise that selecting a candidate who seems safely familiar will seem to much of the public merely like recycling junk; and if they can make a great leap of imagination to realise that what the majority of the public is desperate for is actually someone just like Kemi Badenoch, they will do the utterly unthinkable — and elect a winner.
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