The Tory party’s greatest problem

To date, the contest is characterised by an unseemly bidding war among candidates offering fringe nationalist totems to a party at its lowest ever ebb.  From potentially or actually pulling the UK out of the European Convention on Human Rights; to reviving the last government’s costly, chaotic, now cancelled Rwanda asylum policy; to unwisely and unprofessionally endorsing Donald Trump in the United States presidential election, obscure, extreme and retrograde nationalist positioning abounds.

Sadly, candidates only differ by degree in the extent to which they think the Tory party should embrace the far-right nationalist rabble-rouser Nigel Farage and his Reform party. All six would-be Tory leaders are united in their embrace of his anti-Europe, anti-immigrant agenda.

Fringe views and policy ideas loom so large in this leadership contest because of where the power lies: the Tory party membership, which has a huge influence in selecting the party leader.

Tragically, the dwindling numbers of Tory members are even more aligned with Farage – Britain’s perennial Poujadist – than with their own parliamentary party. According to a July YouGov poll commissioned by Queen Mary University of London and Sussex University, the membership is evenly split on whether the Conservative Party should merge with Reform: 47% support a merger with 48% against.

Into this toxic mix, a party membership survey by ConservativeHome.com, the principal non-party forum for party activists, finds Badenoch the frontrunner on 33%, followed by Jenrick’s 19%. Cleverly and Tugendhat are on 10%; Patel, 8% and Stride, 2% with 18% reporting that they don’t know.

Assuming the fractious and divided parliamentary party doesn’t cohere around one candidate – as it did three times previously, precisely to avoid a membership ballot – members will vote on two finalists shortlisted by MPs after exhaustive ballots in which the candidate with the lowest vote is eliminated.

Thus the Leader of His Majesty’s Loyal Opposition will be decided by about 140,000 Tory members, the same cohort who, back in 2022, chose Liz Truss over Rishi Sunak. This number equates to one quarter of one percent of the electorate, or as the former Tory party chairman Chris Patten pithily observed, around one-ninth of the membership of the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds.

The Tory vote share of 23.7% at 2024’s election was a record low – but party members aren’t even representative of that. They are even less representative than the party’s 121 MPs, who are at least elected.

This remoteness from political reality is reflected in the incredibly poor selection decisions made in the quarter-century since members acquired voting rights. In 2001, the party’s rulebook facilitated Iain Duncan-Smith’s leadership, by common consent the worst Tory leader of the opposition in living memory, if not also the party’s formal 190-year history. And in 2019 and 2022, the rules ensured the election of Boris Johnson and Liz Truss respectively.

These egregious political errors were also the worst option in each case for pro-Europeans. Duncan-Smith defeated the more experienced, electable, and pro-Europe Ken Clarke while Johnson beat 2016 Remainer-turned-Leaver Jeremy Hunt. Ever the opportunist, Truss (a remainer) beat Rishi Sunak (a leaver) by completing her long journey from student Lib Dem activist to 2016 remainer to hard-right europhobe. She can now be found on stage arguing the case for a second Trump term.

Ultimately, all three lost the confidence of their MPs, falling foul of the party’s safety valve. If 15 per cent of Tory MPs write letters of no confidence to the chairman of the 1922 Committee of Tory backbenchers, there is an election contest.

Following three successive substantial general election defeats, Tory members were prepared to choose the less anti-Europe, and arguably more electable, David Cameron, who beat David Davis. But Cameron pledged to withdraw the Tory group in the European Parliament from the mainstream centre-right bloc, alarming Angela Merkel and Nicholas Sarkozy, and forcing alliances with far-right extremists.

Similarly, the party rulebook arguably spared Britain the prospect of Andrea Leadsom as PM, when MPs coalesced around Theresa May, thus swerving a members’ vote. But the fact that such a ballot was anticipated, expected and a likely future fixture transformed May, from reluctant Remainer, barely campaigning in 2016’s referendum for fear of alienating party members in any future leadership contest, to castigating “citizens of nowhere” and backing the hardest of EU exits.

Quite simply, the party’s current rules skew candidates’ incentives away from the concerns of the voting public – and pro-Europeans – to pander to the nationalist obsessions and illusions of a tiny minority. 

That approach backfired at the last election, in which voters punished Leave’s champions and cheerleaders. The record national 10.8% Tory-Labour swing and the 10.4% UK-wide Tory-Lib-Dem swing, were significantly surpassed by Jacob Rees-Mogg and Penny Mordaunt, who both lost their seats on a -19.5% swing; David Davis and Esther McVey clung on with -18.8% and -16.4% swings respectively. Liam Fox lost with a -14.9% swing.

Prominent Leavers who stood down before the election, left their unfortunate successors to take the blow. The swing in Nadhim Zahawi’s former seat was -24.5%; Michael Gove’s -20.9%; John Redwood’s -19.4%; Nadine Dorries’ -18.5%; Andrea Leadsom’s -17.8%; Kwasi Kwarteng’s -16.9%; and Dominic Raab’s -13.8%.  

Liz Truss became the first ex-party leader to lose their seat since 1935, on a -26.2% swing. Cameron’s former seat, Witney, fell on a -20.4% swing; May’s Maidenhead was lost on -18.9%; as were Johnson’s Henley & Thames on -17.0% and Uxbridge & Ruislip on -16.9%.

Candidates in this latest leadership contest also survived huge swings. The swing against Badenoch was -21.6%; the anti-Cleverly figure was -20.9%; Patel, -19.5%; Jenrick -16.3%; Stride -15.2%; and Tugendhat -13.8%.

While inflating the importance of nationalist politics and policies, the power the party gives to its members also has a damaging impact on candidate quality.  Introduced in 1998 by then Tory leader William Hague, partly to increase party membership, which failed, and in part to keep pro-Europe rival Clarke at bay, which succeeded, the rules amplify members’ often unsophisticated political judgement, placing narrow ideological litmus tests ahead of political skill as well as electoral appeal. Hague no longer supports the system he introduced but leaders elected this way are reluctant to remove members’ votes.

Chris Patten notes the modern party’s penchant for passing over talent and ability in favour of mediocrity, wryly observing of the six leadership candidates: “Margaret Thatcher wouldn’t have had some of these people in her cabinet.”  This tendency intensified post-2016, as Leavers, by conviction and from convenience, increasingly filled cabinet posts. Pre-2016 Tory regimes tolerated colourful, often controversial and less cerebral backbench MPs but post-2016 an ex-TV reality-show contestant, a former GB News presenter and someone the House of Commons Speaker described as “stupid” sat in cabinet.

The weight of members’ nationalist sentiment also explains this election’s statistically unlikely predominance of anti-immigration hardliners from immigrant families: half the candidate slate.

Whoever wins the latest contest,the new leader will head a parliamentary party 44 MPs short of its 1997 number, 81 fewer than Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour MPs in 2019 and 88 down on Michael Foot’s in 1983. The Tories are only parliament’s Official Opposition thanks to winning 49 more seats than the Lib Dems. 

Will they turn towards or away from Reform? Chasing the Farage vote has been tested to destruction, but that may not prove an impediment to them trying yet again. 

Only 18 months after Cameron’s fateful 2013 speech pledging an in-out EU referendum, then Farage’s principal demand, Ukip finished first in the European Elections with 26.6% of the vote and 34.7% of the UK’s seats. At 2015’s general election, Farage’s first political incarnation earned 12.6% of the vote and one MP.  Now, after a hiatus allowing Tories to execute a hard EU exit, Farage is back with 14.3% of the vote and five MPs.

Will the new Tory leader campaign to leave the European Convention on Human Rights, a non-EU body? Oppose the government’s renegotiation of the UK-EU Trade & Cooperation Agreement, up for renewal in 2026? Revive the Rwanda policy while Starmer creates a new border force and seeks cooperation with the EU to help solve the global migrant crisis? If these and other current obsessions fail to move the polls, MPs may soon lose faith in their new leader.

The parliamentary party’s ideology is largely unchanged despite being only one-third the number of the previous parliament, according to a study out of Liverpool University by Paul Jeffrey and analysis by ConservativeHome’s executive editor, the former Tory MP turned peer Paul Goodman. But the same self-interest that drives MPs from the party’s realist wing into supporting hardliners perceived as likely next leaders will drive future instability, including leadership elections, especially if the new party leader doesn’t look like a winner.

Accordingly, the leader elected on November 2nd might not last a full parliament, like Cameron, May, Johnson and Truss before them, and Duncan-Smith in opposition. Merely 19 MPs are now needed to force a no confidence vote in the leader, and only 61 to remove them. Even in government, over the past eight years Tory leaders lasted on average only 19 months.

Pro-Europeans wanting Tories to reconnect with the national interest and longtime party staples of economic realism and foreign policy realpolitik are in for the long haul. Repurposing the party won’t be easy. And in this leadership election there isn’t a pro-Europe candidate to inspire, rally around and lead the way.

Barnaby Towns is a former Conservative Party government special adviser and campaign strategist