As Russell Crowe once roared in Gladiator: “Are you not entertained?” Sir Keir Starmer’s Labour Government has got off to a reassuringly boring start – but the Conservatives, at least, are putting on a gladiatorial show this summer for those suffering from withdrawal symptoms three weeks on from the general election.
On Monday afternoon we will find out who the confirmed “runners and riders” will be in the Tory party’s third leadership contest in two years. Although this always seems an odd term to use, because there will be many riders fighting over just one horse – the poor old Conservative Party.
Labour’s commanding majority of 158 – even after the suspension of the seven rebels over the two-child benefit cap – strongly suggests there won’t be the faintest chance of another Tory prime minister much before 2029. And then only if the Conservatives win the general election, which seems unlikely.
We plebs in the stands can sit back and enjoy the spectacle of Tory wannabes metaphorically slicing, garroting and netting each other, just like they did when they were in government. This time without having to worry that the victor is going to stagger straight into No 10.
On past form, the man or woman who finally emerges on 2 November as Rishi Sunak’s replacement is never going to be prime minister. As leader of the opposition they may have a bearing on how the Conservative Party reshapes and reforms itself, but no more than that.
The last time Labour buried the Conservatives in a landslide in 1997 it took four party leaders to get back into power. William Hague replaced John Major, only to be felled by Tony Blair again. Next came Iain Duncan Smith, then Michael Howard, then David Cameron, who at last scraped back into coalition in 2010.
The story was similar on the other side after Blair was forced out in 2007. The party worked through Gordon Brown, Ed Miliband and Jeremy Corbyn before anointing Starmer, finally an election winner in 2024.
It will almost certainly take several elections and leaders before the Conservatives – who, let’s face it, have let down themselves and let down the country – are trusted to govern again.
Labour strategist Morgan McSweeney may be telling the party to fight each day as if they are going to lose next time, and Tory strategists may comfort themselves picking over the details of the election result, with its low turnout and greater number of marginal seats. If only their share of the vote nudges up just a few percentage points they would be back in business, they hope. Yet the British electorate is not typically so forgiving.
Once they have changed the party in charge, voters are grudgingly inclined to give it a decent stint in power.
This is indeed “a Conservative country that sometimes votes Labour”. The Conservatives get the strike more often, but once Conservative or Labour get in, they are allowed a decent innings. The Tory run from Churchill’s 1951 victory to the end of Alec Douglas-Home lasted 13 consecutive years, Margaret Thatcher and Major had 18 years, Blair and Brown 13 years, and the Cameron-Sunak era 14 years.
In a functioning parliamentary democracy like ours, the logic of the slowly swinging pendulum is more important than the colour of the rosettes. When a party has been in power too long, it becomes tired, corrupt and incompetent. It will have drained its pool of talent, but those little fish remaining feel more entitled than ever to govern the country in their own interests. So the electorate kick it out. Meanwhile the other main party, kicked out more than a decade ago for similar reasons, has had the chance to rebuild itself into one fit to govern.
These transformations take longer than one election cycle. True, Starmer went from considering resignation after defeat in the Hartlepool by-election to Prime Minister only three years later. But he took over his party towards the end of the pendulum swing, after Labour had completed a decade of dead-end ideological self-indulgence. Meanwhile prime minister Boris Johnson took the Tories to the apogee before an extended downswing of Tory decadence.
The question facing the Conservative Party now is whether they carry on as before, appeasing the right and looking to win back Reform voters, regardless of the fact that they lost more seats to the Liberal Democrats. One rising star from the Cameron era predicted that his party would go for “one more crazy” before ploughing back to the centre ground – and that was before he failed to win his safe seat.
If Penny Mordaunt had held hers in Portsmouth, perhaps she would be walking towards a coronation. She didn’t. That means that the names of these gladiators aspiring to lead the party and the country are somewhat less well known than Maximus Decimus Meridius, commander of the armies of the north, etc.
If all goes to plan this Tory leadership contest will run to multiple rounds – like Strictly, only with brute behaviour encouraged
On Monday, the penultimate sitting day for the Commons summer holidays, there are likely to be numerous combatants flexing their muscles. This means the first task for Tory MPs when they get back in September will be to trim the list down to four. These four will then strut their stuff before the Conservative conference at the end of the month. MPs will then choose the two finalists to be voted on by the party membership during October.
Four men – Tom Tugendhat, Robert Jenrick, James Cleverly and Mel Stride – are already in. Three women – Kemi Badenoch, Priti Patel, Suella Braverman – have picked up nomination papers and are expected to muster the 10 Conservative MP signatures necessary for nomination. Others including Claire Coutinho, Laura Trott and Kevin Hollinrake are seeing if they can make it.
To say that none of them are politicians of achievement in government is an understatement. The dark horse Hollinrake probably comes off best for his handling of the Post Office scandal. Those like Patel and Braverman may have reached the higher offices of state – but such positions did not dignify them. Jenrick wins the JD Vance prize for trampling his previous beliefs in the stampede for preferment. But former ardent Remainers and Europeans, Stride and Tugendhat, have both trimmed toward leaving the European Convention on Human Rights.
No-one in this field looks like the next Conservative prime minister of the United Kingdom. Who cares who wins? Let the tournament and the political bloodshed begin.
Adam Boulton presents ‘Sunday Morning’ on Times Radio
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