Tory Popular Conservatives are on the march with a simple elusive task – to install a Liz Truss who is not Liz Truss in the event of a general election loss.
The Truss status has ensured a return of some by now limp jokes about lettuces and the general oddity of the former leader. That does not matter much to those attracted by the narrative that she was a victim of circumstance and bad timing.
So the PopConmobile is rolling forth, appointing Mark Littlewood, a veteran think-tanker and erstwhile Lib Dem, albeit of the more “ultra” liberal persuasion, as head of strategy. Pop Con ideology is, counter-intuitively, based on the old Leninist dictum: “The worse, the better.”
In the event of a heavy landslide defeat to Labour and the Conservatives being reduced to a rump, it would take 70 MPs and 70,000 Tory member votes to swing the vote for the next Tory leader PopCon-wards in the likely “battle for the soul” of the party. Is it a promise for a resurgent new right – or (let us not miss the obvious pun here) – a con?
Littlewood is an affable character of a warhorse disposition who represents the more socially liberal, ultra-free-market end of this spectrum and has a longstanding ideological friendship with Truss. That gives Pop Cons the bones of a structure – he was an effective, communicative head of the libertarian Institute of Economic Affairs think-tank – albeit with the organisation’s less edifying reputation of being overly close to the excuse-making of the tobacco industry.
A political movement is however a different beast.
So on my straw poll (thank you, WhatsApp) of Tory MPs, the response to Littlewood’s analysis (as shared with The Times) is that it is, as one veteran of races on the right of the party puts it, “plausible but probably not true”.
Two hurdles arise. The first is that it is far from certain that the hardline Conservatives would survive a near-wipeout any more than the allegedly mimsy “centrist Conservatives” they hope to replace. Tory moderates might even turn out to be a hardy perennial: of the 169 seats the party is forecast to retain in a recent YouGov predictive analysis, the “softy tendency” One Nation group would retain 50 members, while only a third of the MPs who took a hardline position on the Rwanda would be in the Commons.
These are, of course, predictions that can be overturned by which seats are won or lost. Pop Cons also have an “enemy without” in Nigel Farage and Reform UK. Do latter-day Trussites fancy linking up with nationalists of the Farage variety? By floating the pugnacious, if erratic, Priti Patel as a possible candidate, Pop Cons seem, as one of their number tells me, to suggest that a “home-made Conservative revival” is a better option than banking on a tetchy alliance with Reform.
The Pop Con flowering also reminds me that I have covered “out-there” challenges to the Conservative Party for a long time – from the days when the late tycoon Jimmy Goldsmith launched the Referendum Party in the 1990s (which was such an eclectic mix of the well-heeled and socially cross-connected key members that it was dubbed “the party party” , through the rise of Ukip in its various iterations, and now Reform). The question Tories will face is whether they want to import such a deep ideological split into their own ranks at the risk of alienating a lot of stalwart Conservatives who think they are frankly nuts.
The gap between technocratic free marketeers who want supply-side economic reform (even Labour’s Rachel Reeves is starting to bandy these terms around) and libertarians who favour freedom to the extent of removing many guardrails about the consequences is very wide. And Pop Cons seem to have adopted a low-immigration message, which is not necessarily in line with the desire to free the economy from bureaucratic constraints.
Someone is going to have to lead fellow Tories more clearly through the thickets of this logic. To judge by recent speechifying, Truss is the spiritual leader of this movement, but the present candidate favoured to put up for the leadership is Patel. What could possibly go wrong?
Both are strong-minded characters with, to put it delicately, a tendency to want their own way. Replicating the odd Reform UK situation in which Farage is the “real” movement leader but Richard Tice does the donkey work does not look like a very convincing plan.
The make-or-break rule of Tory races is for a faction to get its leader into the final two of the contest – with strong opposition from the present front runner, Kemi Badenoch. It is not impossible for the Pop Cons to nab the other spot. But to do so, they need a performative star – not just a back room full of ideologies. Until that basic choice is made, the Pop Cons, for all the fun and fuss, will remain a chimera.
Anne McElvoy hosts the Power Play podcast for POLITICO
