The Tories who are fit to serve have no wish to do so – Why the party conference should have been a moment to reflect on that

H ope, it seems, springs eternal in Tory breasts. No matter how disastrous the outlook might appear for their party, members can always cheer themselves up by exercising their right to choose new leaders, in the full knowledge that within months they will be plotting against them for not being “conservative” enough.

This time around, morale was boosted even more because a crucial stage in the usual post-disaster leadership battle coincided with the party’s annual conference. Conservatives like to feel noticed, and despite distracting happenings in the Middle East, the beauty contest staged in Birmingham was sure to win a place in the headlines.

The party is no stranger to conferences dominated by the leadership question. At Blackpool in 1963, three contenders – Rab Butler, Reggie Maudling and Lord Hailsham – paraded their credentials to succeed Harold Macmillan. In those days, though, the final decision was taken in a secretive internal selection process rather than being thrown open to the members. And the party was still in office in 1963, rather than seeking an electoral saviour.

A more comparable conference pageant took place in 2005, when five declared candidates made 20-minute pitches. Famously, David Cameron’s unscripted effort transformed the contest, making him the clear front-runner in place of the pre-conference favourite, David Davis. However, once again, the parallel is inexact: although the Tories were meeting after a general election defeat, 2005 was a third successive failure, and Cameron’s audience was prepared to forgive him anything – even a claim to be Tony Blair’s heir.

Few conference speeches wear well, but time has been particularly unkind to Cameron’s. Telling his audience that the party must change if it wanted to appeal to young voters, he invited them to “build together a new generation of Conservatives”. He urged: “Let’s switch a new generation on to Conservative ideas. Let’s dream a new generation of Conservative dreams.”

A compassionate Conservative party built in his image would, he promised, transform the political process so that young people would no longer tell him “how sick they are of the whole political system – the shouting, finger-pointing, backbiting and point-scoring in the House of Commons. That’s all got to go.” It didn’t.

Before this year’s conference, it was interesting to guess which of the party’s numerous recent leaders would receive name-checks from the contenders. Boris Johnson won a heartfelt tribute from Tom Tugendhat for having saved Ukraine; Robert Jenrick revealed with apparent pride that he had given his daughter the unusual middle name Thatcher. No one seemed anxious to praise either Theresa May or Liz Truss (although the latter attracted a decent audience for an unapologetic fringe appearance).

The nearest approach to a reference to Cameron was James Cleverly’s claim that Brexit was a Conservative achievement. Cameron certainly deserves his share of the credit, although leaving the European Union was not among the “Conservative dreams” he evoked back in 2005.

I was the future once

There was one part of Cameron’s 2005 speech that was just as relevant 19 bruising years later. To those who urged that the party should move to right, he replied: “That will turn us into a fringe party, never able to challenge for government again. I don’t want to let that happen to this party. Do you?” The audience of 2005 was too polite (or temporarily star-struck) to give him their honest answer.

For the defiantly unmodernised attendees of 2024, beauty is in the right eye of the beholder.

In 2005, much of Cameron’s speech concerned his shadow policy brief – education. He spoke favourably about overseas aid, and although he made a couple of sly digs at the EU, he said nothing at all about immigration. The candidates of 2024 occasionally strayed outside that topic – to talk about maternity pay or the alleged anti-terrorist tactics of British soldiers – but there is no real escape from the party’s immigration monomania. Thus, any debate on the issue of human rights becomes a matter of migration statistics rather than humanity, or rights.

By all accounts, the mood at the Birmingham conference was buoyant compared to Labour’s Liverpool doomfest. Yet while Conservative members exulted in the new government’s misfortunes, somewhere in the party’s secret soul must be a realisation that, when it tries to explain what went wrong this time, its search should begin with its frivolous process of leader selection.

When Rishi Sunak steps down, there will be as many living ex-Tory leaders as former England football managers. Whatever the qualities of the latest quartet of aspirants, easily the best speech at Birmingham was delivered by the retiring Sunak – who would probably have been beaten in a leadership ballot if the right had found anyone to oppose him.

Another past conference is relevant here. In 1963, after that year’s beauty pageant, the party’s grandees decided that the new leader should be none of the above and instead drafted in the previously unconsidered Alec Douglas-Home. This would be unthinkable nowadays – apart from anything else, the party’s grandees are no longer very grand. However, even if Douglas-Home was the wrong choice in 1963, the old undemocratic “magic circle” was at least designed to come up with a leader, rather than someone who is foredoomed to follow the whims of the party unfaithful.

There are two kinds of Tory ex-leader: the ones who are sadder and wiser, and those who are just older. The party would be well-advised to drag one of the former types out of retirement, to serve as a caretaker while it decides on its future direction. The Conservative catch-22 is that the ones who are fit to serve have no wish to do so. Not even Lord “Comeback” Cameron could be persuaded – an instance of twice bitten, thrice shy.

There were plenty of “Conservative dreamers” at the Birmingham beauty contest, but Cameroonian “compassion” was in pretty short supply.

Sources:

▪ This piece was originally published in The Conversation and re-published in PUBLIC SQUARE UK on 4 October 2024. | The author writes in a personal capacity.

▪ Cover: Flickr/Conservative Party. (Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.)