Major Tom has lost control

Unlike other recent Tory leadership battles, the winner of this contest will not become prime minister at its conclusion – a change several of the party’s leading lights still visibly find profoundly unfair – but will instead have the thankless task of leading the smallest parliamentary Conservative Party in history back towards being a viable government.

The problem is that before any would-be leader can prepare the Conservative Party to face the voters once again they have to secure a mandate first from its few remaining MPs and then from the tiny slice of the nation that still holds a Conservative membership card.

The actions of the earliest candidates to declare show exactly what those contenders think the party wants, and that’s Reform policies wrapped up in Conservative branding. 

Tom Tugendhat has long been the standard bearer of the moderate rump of the Conservative Party, and he has once again thrown his hat in the ring – only in 2024, his opening salvo suggests that he’s running on a platform that Suella Braverman would’ve been happy to adopt in 2022.

Tugendhat is bravely standing up to tell the Conservative base exactly what he thinks they want to hear, while also trying to downplay issues that once might have been challenging for him in an election campaign. There’s no need to talk about the European Convention on Human Rights, or net zero, or gender, or tax rates, he says – because they all agree.

Some of this is just ridiculous on its face. It would be bizarre if every candidate agreed on the exact structure of the UK tax system, because at this point several of them probably haven’t thought very much on it. Tugendhat is really saying nothing much more than saying that they would all like taxes to be lower, which is a comment roughly as profound as wishing it were Christmas every day.

But alongside the anodyne are some serious concessions. In very recent history, Tugendhat was one of few Tories still willing to stand up for British membership of the ECHR, which is not only essential for the Good Friday Agreement and power-sharing in Northern Ireland, but also as a result essential for normal relations with the EU. 

He has now strategically ditched sanity in a bid for power. His junking of net zero is a similar proposal, jettisoning reality for positioning – and it’s one that is likely to fail, as Tugendhat is an intelligent man who would not deny climate change or the need to tackle it entirely, meaning he will be outflanked by someone more extreme. This will likely all be for naught.

To get back into power, Conservatives will have to win back many seats they lost in 2024. That relies on remembering to whom they lost them, which is where that mantra comes in: Labour 411, Lib Dems 72, Reform 5. Almost every Lib Dem gain was a Conservative loss. The same is true for Labour. 

A protracted street fight with Reform for the hard right of British politics will condemn the Tories to the status of political irrelevances, and there seems to be almost no-one within their party who will face up to that.

One Tory insider, though, had an optimistic theory of the case for Tugendhat’s tactic. Could I think, he asked archly, of any other party leaders in recent UK political history who had come to power by promising one thing to their party’s activist base, only to sharply pivot at the first possible opportunity?

Answers on a postcard, please…