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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
The Conservative Party has long laid claim to being the world’s most successful political party, not least because it is also one of the most adaptable, often appearing to do and say pretty much whatever it takes to win. But has it now shot itself in the foot by trying too hard to fight off Nigel Farage?
Since the UK voted to leave the EU back in 2016, the Tories have arguably done more than simply re-shape themselves: rather, they seem to have transformed themselves from a mainstream centre-right party into an ersatz radical right-wing populist outfit – one characterized by an often counter-intuitive combination of culture war concerns, on the one hand, and free market fundamentalism, on the other.
In this compelling and persuasively argued book, Tim Bale, one of the country's foremost experts on contemporary British politics, takes us on a rollercoaster ride through the Conservatives’ fortunes over the last decade. From the bombshell Brexit referendum, through the chaotic premierships of Theresa May, Boris Johnson, and Liz Truss, to the party’s electoral comeuppance under Rishi Sunak and its attempted renewal with Kemi Badenoch at the helm, Bale tells the fascinating tale of a party that, in just a few short years, has gone from nervous breakdown to top of the world – and back again.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023
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Table of Contents
Cover
Praise
Title Page
Copyright Page
Epigraph
Acknowledgements
1 Going with the flow
Notes
2 May in her pomp (July 2016–April 2017)
Johnson and Leadsom implode – and May takes the crown
Brexit means ‘hard Brexit’
Snap! The road to an early election
Notes
3 Hubris to nemesis (April–June 2017)
Pulling in different directions: disagreements on strategy and messaging
Policy and presentational problems
Organizational shortcomings
Post-mortem: the election result analysed
Notes
4 A bad hand played badly (June 2017–May 2019)
May tries to steady the ship
Post-mortem as catharsis – and some home improvements
Rebellion and reshuffle
Chequers chucked
May hangs on – but cannot win
Endgame
Notes
5 Over before it began (June–July 2019)
A tweak to the rules
The bookies’ favourite
The also-rans
Bowing to the inevitable: the contest plays out
Notes
6 Brexit achieved; Boris rampant (July–December 2019)
Rewarding loyalty and readying for an election
Punishing dissent and proroguing parliament
Disappointing the DUP to seal the Brexit deal
Preparing for battle
Winning big: the 2019 election
The results explained
Notes
7 Pandemonium (January–December 2020)
Coronavirus – the crisis begins
Barnard Castle and other stories
Statuesque
Lockdown contested
Covid redux
Parliamentary pressure groups and the cancelling of Christmas
Notes
8 Coming up for air (January–October 2021)
Covid on pause: normal service resumed?
Dom bites back
In denial on institutional racism?
Brexit, boats, by-elections – and ministers behaving badly
Free at last? Not so fast!
Tensions – and changes – at the top
Notes
9 Things fall apart (October 2021–April 2022)
A friend in need: Owen Paterson
Saving the planet, social care, and small boats
Peppa, parties, and ‘Plan B’
Some relief – but precious little comfort
Sue Gray – and PC Plod
War – real and imaginary
Trouble for Sunak but a let-off for Johnson
Notes
10 End of the road? (April–September 2022)
Trouble upon trouble
Zebra with a gammy leg
Embarrassment after embarrassment
And they’re off! Choosing a new leader
Notes
11 Two last bites at the cherry (September 2022–December 2023)
Truss self-immolates: hubris begets nemesis in just forty-four days
Downfall
Least said, soonest mended
Room for improvement?
Dilemmas and departures
Good news, bad news
Notes
12 Going, going, gone? (January–October 2024)
Bad omens: by-elections, defections, and the locals
Naming the date: the election is called
Coup de grâce: the 2024 general election
Explaining the result
Contest without a choice
A new beginning – or the same old song?
Notes
Index
End User License Agreement
List of Tables
Chapter 5
Table 1.
The 2019 leadership contest: parliamentary stage
Chapter 10
Table 2.
The 2022 leadership contest: parliamentary stage
Chapter 12
Table 3.
The 2024 leadership contest: parliamentary stage
Guide
Cover
Table of Contents
Begin Reading
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Praise
Praise for The Conservative Party after Brexit
‘Written by one of Britain’s most respected experts on British politics, this timely book clearly explains the rapidly unfolding crises and political drama of Brexit and its impact on the Conservatives since 2016. Bale writes with wonderful flair and panache, and skilfully provides a highly absorbing and engaging account of recent momentous events.’
Peter Dorey, Professor of British Politics, Cardiff University
‘Tim Bale provides a masterly account of the twists and turns in the fortunes of the Conservative party since the Brexit Referendum. For anyone who wants to understand the desperate position in which the party now finds itself this book is an essential guide.’
Andrew Gamble, Chair in Politics, University of Sheffield
‘The Conservative Party after Brexit is a rare combination: gripping and erudite. A triumph of objectivity and pace.’
Gary Gibbon, Political Editor, Channel 4 News
‘A fascinating book with so much detail on why the political explosions and implosions of the past few years have happened, and what they’ll mean for politics in years to come. It’s essential reading to understand where the Conservative party is today.’
Isabel Hardman, author, Assistant Editor of the Spectator, and presenter of the BBC’s Week in Westminster
‘Tim Bale has written a careful, immaculately constructed, balanced and convincing account of what happens when a governing party ceases to remember what it most believes in.’
Andrew Marr, LBC presenter and Political Editor of the New Statesman
‘An extraordinary account of an astonishing period. It’s only seeing it committed to print that rams home to me what a privilege it’s been to be in the thick of it and trying to make sense of it. Tim brings an admirable clarity to an incredible sequence of events.’
Chris Mason, BBC Political Editor
‘One of the most acute, witty, and historically informed observers of British politics, bringing a fierce historian’s eye to the present-tense.’
Rory Stewart, author and co-presenter of The Rest is Politics podcast
‘Brilliantly captures a governing party struggling with the historic decision to leave the EU and its many epic consequences…a dream book for those who relish a gripping narrative combined with illuminating analysis.’
Steve Richards, author and presenter of the BBC’s Week in Westminster and the Rock & Roll Politics podcast
‘Tim Bale’s gripping book perfectly captures the facts, the drama and the mood of the “Brexit wars” that set the Conservative Party on its current reckless and self-destructive path. Some of it I read through my fingers like a horror story, but I couldn’t put it down!’
Amber Rudd, former Conservative Secretary of State
THE CONSERVATIVE PARTY AFTER BREXIT
Turmoil and Transformation
Tim Bale
polity
Copyright Page
Copyright © Tim Bale 2025
The right of Tim Bale to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published in 2023 by Polity Press
This paperback edition published in 2025 by Polity Press
Polity Press
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ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-4601-5
ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-6960-1 (pb)
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The publisher has used its best endeavours to ensure that the URLs for external websites referred to in this book are correct and active at the time of going to press. However, the publisher has no responsibility for the websites and can make no guarantee that a site will remain live or that the content is or will remain appropriate.
Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been overlooked the publisher will be pleased to include any necessary credits in any subsequent reprint or edition.
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Epigraph
Those who know how to win are much more numerous than those who know how to make proper use of their victories.
Polybius, Histories, Book 10, Ch. 31
Acknowledgements
So many people have contributed – most of them unwittingly – to this book that it’s clearly impossible to name them all. Most obviously, that includes the journalists, the bloggers, the tweeters, and the politicians whose words I’ve read or listened to, sometimes in person, sometimes ‘by remote’, whether on Zoom or in the media, be it legacy or social (especially Twitter/X). The same goes to all those academics, pollsters, and think tankers whose work on policy and politics has provided both food for thought and fascinating data. Without those people, there would be no book, so I owe them a huge debt of gratitude which, I know, can’t really be compensated for by a fleeting appearance in the notes or the text. As for institutions, as well as my own university, Queen Mary University of London (QMUL), and its Mile End Institute, I would like to thank the ESRC initiative UK in a Changing Europe, and in particular its Director, Anand Menon, firstly, for creating the invaluable repository of first-hand interviews that is the Brexit Witness Archive and, secondly, for letting me disappear off to write this book. I wouldn’t have been able to do that, however, without the incredibly generous funding provided by the Leverhulme Trust, which kindly awarded me a Major Research Fellowship that gave me the time, space, and resources to put it together. I’d also like to acknowledge the ESRC for funding the Party Members Project, research from which (conducted by me, Paul Webb, and Monica Poletti, with the help of YouGov) features in the pages of this book. Thanks go, too, to Palgrave Macmillan for permission to draw, in several places, on material from The British General Election of 2019. As usual, this book’s publisher, Polity (especially Louise Knight, Olivia Jackson, and Inès Boxman, and also the two readers they persuaded to review the manuscript), have been absolutely brilliant. The same goes for my copy-editor, Justin Dyer. Then, of course, there are the various colleagues, collaborators, and co-authors who have had to put up with me not only banging on about the Tories (and, in some cases, whining pathetically about being selected as an ‘impact case study’ for the Research Excellence Framework [REF]) but also occasionally delaying other things I’ve committed to in order to progress this particular project. In addition to everyone (not just academics but our wonderful professional services staff) at QMUL’s School of Politics and International Relations, people who spring most immediately to mind in this context (with red-faced apologies to anyone I’ve missed) include Paul Webb, Cristóbal Rovira Kaltwasser, Rob Ford, Will Jennings, Paula Surridge, Anand Menon (yes, him again), Alan Wager, Phil Cowley, Karl Pike, Matthew Barnfield, Patrick Diamond, Lee Jones, Sophie Harman, James Dunkerley, James Strong, Kim Hutchings, David Williams, Matthew Hilton, Sofia Cusano, and my always inspirational friend (and Twitter/X threadmeister) Rob Saunders. The person who has had most to put up with and has also done most to help me out, however, is, as per, my wife Jackie. I dedicate this book to her, as well as – not for the first (nor, I hope, the last) time – to Javi, Bel, and Jack.
1Going with the flow
10 p.m. on Thursday, 12 December 2019: time for the exit poll to drop. To no one’s great surprise, it forecast a convincing overall majority and another term in office for the Conservative Party. The Prime Minister was understandably delighted. So many people had wondered whether he could ever really do it. But George Osborne had always backed himself to win and, when the time came, win big.
So now for that reshuffle. Never an easy task, of course. But at least he no longer had to worry about what to do with Boris. Having bet the house on Leave and lost, Johnson may have been the darling of the grassroots, but, as Osborne had long calculated, that hardly mattered given how many of his parliamentary colleagues had been determined to ensure that a man they regarded as both a total shit and a complete joke didn’t make it into the final two. His ambitions thus dashed, the would-be ‘World King’ had decided not to stand again at the general election but had opted instead to step away from politics in order, as ‘friends’ told journalists, to ‘make money and have some fun’.
Theresa May, of course, had done no such thing. Having joined Osborne in the run-off phase of the autumn 2019 leadership contest only to crumble (just as he guessed she would) when exposed to a few weeks of intense campaign scrutiny, she’d opted to continue with a proverbial life of public service in the House of Commons. But if May was harbouring any hopes that she would be allowed to enjoy a record tenth year as Home Secretary, she was about to be deeply disappointed. True, thought Osborne, she was bound to make herself awkward on the backbenches now and then. But that would be a price worth paying just to see her face when he called her in to Number Ten tomorrow to give her the news. Whether he’d do it brutally – perhaps even tell her she ought to get to know the party better before bundling her out of the back door – or instead twist the knife by sarcastically laying it on thick, he hadn’t quite decided.
In any case, he had more than enough to do before then. First thing tomorrow he’d take a few calls from his fellow EU heads of government. Some of them, he knew, had been surprised when they’d heard he was calling a snap general election in mid-December – until, that is, he’d explained that he, of all people, wasn’t going to make the same mistake as Gordon Brown had made back in 2007 when he’d hesitated and so blown the best chance he’d had of winning his own mandate. Besides, David Cameron, now looking forward to his seat in the Lords (somewhere to pop into for lunch after a morning of lucrative lobbying or between speaking trips abroad), had been incredibly supportive of the idea: ‘Yes, it’ll be cold and damp on the doorstep,’ he’d said. ‘But it’ll all be over by Christmas – and then you can chillax at Chequers over the New Year.’
And that was exactly what Osborne was going to do. It wasn’t as if the Opposition was going to trouble him much over the next few weeks – or months, or even years. Sure, Labour’s MPs had been canny enough not to try to overthrow Corbyn mid-term – better, they’d reckoned, to let him lose so badly that even the party’s deluded members would wake up to the fact that he’d have to go. But the veteran left-winger’s reluctant resignation, announced soon after it became obvious that he’d presided over a catastrophic defeat, would now be followed by a lengthy leadership contest and an even longer period of navel-gazing, if not full-blown civil war.
That should leave Osborne plenty of time to carry on implementing what he still rather enjoyed calling his ‘long-term economic plan’ – even if it involved little more than keeping tax, spending, and borrowing as low as possible, all the while chucking a few prestige infrastructure projects at the North, persuading the Chinese to keep investing, and encouraging EU citizens to keep coming to the UK to do the jobs Brits either wouldn’t or couldn’t do.
The only question for the PM now was would he fight the 2025 election or instead hand over to one of his protégés (Matt Hancock perhaps?) before going to the Lords himself, taking up a few lucrative directorships, doing a spot of journalism, and generally becoming one of the great and the good – you know, editing a newspaper, one or two part-time roles in the City, chairing the Board of Trustees at the British Museum, that sort of thing…
*
This is a book, of course, about what has happened and is happening still, not about what might have been. Yet, however much we might like to emphasize underlying structures and institutions, we nevertheless need to acknowledge the part played by chance, contingency, and human agency. Take the result of the June 2016 referendum on the UK’s membership of the European Union.1 To hear some talk, it was somehow inevitable. In reality, however, it was far from a foregone conclusion – as Dominic Cummings, one of the architects of Leave’s victory, has often stressed.2 Indeed, given how narrow Leave’s margin of victory was, any number of things might have made a difference, most obviously Boris Johnson, Michael Gove, and Cummings himself not deciding to campaign to quit the EU, or else Jeremy Corbyn deciding to put the full weight of the Labour Party behind Remain. Had either, or certainly both, of those things happened, then we might well have lived through, and still be living in, the parallel universe sketched above.
The EU referendum is also a reminder of the fact that the really big splits in the Conservative Party’s long history (and well before political scientists began to talk about ‘personalization’ and ‘presidentialization’ in parliamentary democracies) have always seen fights over an issue conflated with competition for the crown – or, at the very least, competition for a place in ‘the court’ of whoever wears (or aspires to wear) it.3 For today’s Tories, no less than for Edmund Burke, ‘men not measures’ are what matter, although now, quite rightly, women matter too. As a result, arguments over what passes for high principle always take on an additional edge by being bound up with high (and therefore also low) politics – all the more so because Britain’s highly stratified class, educational, and media systems mean that the characters involved have often been playing the same game with the same people for what can seem like forever.4 In any case, and as I have argued elsewhere, all politics inevitably involves not just ideas, interests, and institutions, but also individuals.5
I’m also increasingly persuaded that those individuals, and therefore parties as a whole, are as much tactical and reactive as they are strategic and proactive – actors, in other words, with incredibly short time horizons, who (to quote Cummings again) are ‘dominated by what’s going to appear on TV tonight, what’s going to appear in the papers tomorrow’ and so ‘generally optimise for focus on the political media’s immediate concerns and signalling to in-group factions’.6 Winning elections does, of course, matter to Tories – particularly to Tory MPs worried about hanging on to their seats. But for many of those at the very top of the party an awful lot of their time and energy is devoted to the next leadership election rather than the next general election. Hence, as we shall see, the endless briefing against each other, the continual (highly partial) leaks from Cabinet meetings, the (often ghost-written) op-eds and speeches intended to signal to, and to curry favour with, firstly, the sometimes bewildering array of internal groups that now seem to loom so large in the life of the parliamentary Conservative Party and, secondly, ‘the party in the media’. The latter consists of the editors, commentators, and journalists from the Telegraph and the Mail, as well as the Sun, the Express, and the Spectator, who, while they play no formal role, are, in reality, every bit as integral to the Tory milieu as those who do, even though their product (at least in its print form) now reaches fewer ordinary members of the public than ever it used to – and even though they now compete, co-exist, and cross over with those who work for websites like ConservativeHome and Guido Fawkes and right-wing think tanks/pressure groups like Policy Exchange, the Centre for Policy Studies, the Adam Smith Institute, the Institute for Economic Affairs, and the Taxpayers’ Alliance, as well as the rather more centrist Onward and Bright Blue.7
While, then, it is perfectly possible and often very useful to pull apart contemporary politics thematically and structurally – something I myself have done in other books – I have quite deliberately chosen here to go with (and only occasionally to interrupt) the flow, to present an analytical narrative that captures (but also, I hope, cuts through and makes sense of) the ‘blooming, buzzing confusion’ of political life as it is actually experienced by politicians and parties, as well as by those broadcasters and newspapers and news websites who cover them but who, because they help decide who and what matters, are inevitably players too.8 I’ve also tried hard to reflect the fact that political life seems to have accelerated in recent years owing to the rise of social media, especially Twitter/X and group-chat messaging services like WhatsApp.9
Accordingly, Chapter 2 begins with the extraordinarily dramatic Tory leadership contest triggered by David Cameron’s decision, the morning after the night before, to step down as Prime Minister. It then looks at the all-too-brief honeymoon enjoyed by the victor of that contest, Theresa May, during which she committed the country to a harder Brexit than many had anticipated (or thought wise) before calling an early election that she had initially insisted wouldn’t take place. Chapter 3 analyses that election. Where did it all go so wrong? And what were the consequences for a party that, right up until the last minute, was confidently expecting to be returned with an overall majority, not scrambling to ensure it could carry on as a minority government in a hung parliament? Chapter 4 explores May’s titanic struggle (for once, the adjective is truly apposite) to secure parliamentary support for an orderly withdrawal from the European Union between the summer of 2017 and the summer of 2019. What did that struggle do to the Conservative Party’s ideological balance and integrity (in both the organizational and the moral sense of that word), not just at Westminster but also at the grassroots?
Chapter 5 analyses the second leadership race staged by the party in the aftermath of its disastrous showing at the European Parliament elections – a race which this time involved a contest in the country and not just in the Commons. Boris Johnson may have been one of the few British politicians to be routinely referred to by his first name (even if, in fact, his first name was actually Alexander), but was he really bound to win? And, if so, why? What was the problem to which he seemed (if not to all his parliamentary colleagues or, indeed, their grassroots members) to provide such an obvious solution? Chapter 6 covers the crucial period between Johnson becoming Tory Party leader and the Conservatives securing a ‘stonking’ Commons majority at the 2019 general election. Was it all down to the Prime Minister and his mantra-cum-promise to ‘Get Brexit Done’? Or might there have been rather more to it than that?
Chapters 7 and 8 explore how the Conservatives coped with the challenges posed by Covid-19 and the need to complete the Brexit transition over the course of 2020 and 2021. What tensions did the handling of the pandemic trigger in a party traditionally reluctant to spend money and often very dismissive of the so-called nanny state? And how much were those tensions – exacerbated by individual ambition as much as by ideology and material interests – responsible for the UK experiencing one of the worst death tolls in any advanced democracy?
Chapter 9 looks at how things began to go badly wrong for the party and for Boris Johnson in the autumn of 2021. Chapter 10 takes us through the cascade of events that led to his departure and replacement by Liz Truss in the late summer of 2022. Chapters 11 and 12 then bring the story to a close by covering her spectacular downfall and replacement by Rishi Sunak, his doomed attempt to prevent the party crashing to a landmark election defeat, and the leadership contest in which it attempted to salvage something from the wreckage.
Where exactly is, and what exactly is, the Conservative Party after Brexit? Has it, over the course of getting on for a decade of turmoil and with no little irony, effectively transformed itself – not always intentionally but rather as the by-product of both internal and external competition – from a mainstream centre-right outfit into an ersatz version of the populist radical right insurgency that the referendum was supposed to help see off? And if so, does the Tories’ new leader, the state-shrinking culture warrior Kemi Badenoch, stand any chance, or even have any intention, of changing course? If she doesn’t, can the Conservatives, obliged to operate in an increasingly fragmented and competitive political environment, ever really hope to recover their role as Britain’s ‘natural party of government’?
Notes
1
See Tim Bale,
Brexit: An Accident Waiting to Happen? Why David Cameron Called the 2016 Referendum – and Why He Lost It
(KDP, 2022).
2
Dominic Cummings, ‘On the referendum #21: Branching histories of the 2016 referendum and “the frogs before the storm”’,
https://dominiccummings.com/2017/01/09/on-the-referendum-21-branching-histories-of-the-2016-referendum-and-the-frogs-before-the-storm-2/
. For a more sceptical take on three ‘what-ifs’, see Stephen Bush, ‘Was there a way Brexit could have been stopped? David Lidington’s three hypotheticals’,
New Statesman
, 3 August 2021. For a brilliant essay on the tension between contingency and the ability of analysts to explain (and predict) outcomes using Brexit as a case study, see Colin Hay, ‘Brexistential Angst and the paradoxes of populism: On the contingency, predictability and intelligibility of seismic shifts’,
Political Studies
, 68 (1), 2020, pp. 187–206.
3
See, for example, William Cross, Richard Katz, and Scott Pruysers (eds),
The Personalization of Democratic Politics and the Challenge for Political Parties
(ECPR Press, 2018), and Paul Webb, Thomas Poguntke, and Robin Kolodny, ‘The presidentialization of party leadership?’, in Ludger Helms (ed.),
Comparative Political Leadership
(Palgrave, 2012), pp. 77–98. For a scintillating analysis of government as a court, see R.A.W. Rhodes, ‘Court politics in an age of austerity: David Cameron’s court, 2010–2016’, in Kristoffer Kolltveit and Richard Shaw (eds),
Core Executives in Comparative Perspective
(Palgrave, 2022), pp. 79–122.
4
See Simon Kuper,
Chums
(Profile, 2022).
5
Tim Bale,
The Conservative Party from Thatcher to Cameron
, 2nd Edition (Polity, 2016).
6
See Tanya Gold, ‘The man trying to take down Boris Johnson’,
New York Magazine
, 30 January 2022, and
https://dominiccummings.substack.com/i/63528762/a-few-random-thoughts-on-the-tory-race
. Cummings is not wrong: interview-based academic research on MPs also suggests they are ‘generally media obsessed’: see Aeron Davis,
Political Communication: A New Introduction for Crisis Times
(Polity, 2019), p. 98.
7
The latest circulation figures we have are as follows (data for print from ABC, June 2022, and for online from Statista, September 2021):
Sun
(print 1.2m [March 2020]; online 3.7m)
Daily Mail
(print 860k; online 4.1m):
Daily Telegraph
(print 318k [December 2019]; online 1.1m);
Daily Express
(print 205k; online 1.6m); and the
Spectator
(print 107k). According to survey research in 2017 by the ESRC-funded Party Members Project, the
Daily Telegraph
is read by 33 per cent of Conservative Party members, the
Daily Mail
by 17 per cent, the
Sun
by 3 per cent, and the
Daily Express
by 2 per cent.
8
Those ‘other books’ include, most recently, Tim Bale, Paul Webb, and Monica Poletti,
Footsoldiers: Political Party Membership in the 21st Century
(Routledge, 2019) and Paul Webb and Tim Bale,
The Modern British Party System
(Oxford University Press, 2021).
9
In what follows, tweets are referenced by their URLs. Should access to the site prove difficult in the future, they should be locatable via their URLs using the ‘wayback machine’ (
https://archive.org/web/
). Generally, however, citations from websites refer to the author, title, source, and date on the basis that these can easily be searched for, negating the risk of the URL changing or disappearing. Note that, despite my best efforts, dates of newspaper articles may occasionally be out by one day owing to them being published earlier (or sometimes exclusively) on the paper’s website. Citations for interviews are only given where they are on the record and/or publicly available.
2May in her pomp (July 2016–April 2017)
David Cameron had been Prime Minister for six years and, while he may not have been planning to fight the next election, he’d assumed he’d be doing the job for a while yet. At 8.10 a.m. on 24 June 2016, however, he found himself facing the world’s media (and, a little further off, crowding around the security gates that separate Downing Street from Whitehall, the public) to announce his resignation.
During the referendum campaign Cameron had maintained the fiction that he would stay on if Remain were defeated: to have done anything else, he reasoned, might well have seen the Leave vote swollen by people who had no particular beef with the EU but would have found the opportunity of removing a sitting Tory Prime Minister simply too good a chance to pass up. But it is clear that Cameron himself, and most of those closest to him, knew that, should he lose, he would have to go – not least because, had he not stepped down of his own accord, he would have been ‘hounded out’ by Tory Brexiteers at Westminster and their cheerleaders in the media.1 Even grassroots Conservatives, normally slower than the party’s MPs to lose faith in their leaders, agreed he had to go. Some 59 per cent of the Tory rank and file were telling YouGov, which was now able to conduct surveys of party members as well as voters, that Cameron was right to resign (with only 36 per cent demurring), in spite of the fact that an impressive 87 per cent of them thought he had done well as party leader – including as many as 86 per cent of the 63 per cent of rank-and-file members who had ignored his recommendation and voted Leave.2 In any case, having been through such a bruising battle, during which he had nailed his colours firmly to the mast only to see them unceremoniously torn to shreds by colleagues he’d once considered friends, Cameron was in no mood now to help them out of the mess they’d created: as he reportedly put it to his inner circle that morning, ‘Why should I do all the hard shit for someone else, just to hand it over to them on a plate?’3
Gone and soon forgotten: The Camerons head for the door.
Source: Daniel Leal-Olivas / Alamy.
Johnson and Leadsom implode – and May takes the crown
Quite how hard that shit would turn out to be was not immediately apparent, although the expressions on the faces of Boris Johnson and Michael Gove as they faced the media the morning after the night before gave them, in the words of the Financial Times’s Janan Ganesh, ‘the haunted look of jokers at an auction whose playfully exorbitant bid for a vase had just been accepted with a chilling smash of the gavel’.4 The immediate shock to sterling and the stock market was bad enough, although cushioned somewhat by some well-targeted reassurance from Bank of England Governor Mark Carney. But the real question was how whoever took over from Cameron could negotiate a deal that would simultaneously satisfy Leavers, mollify Remainers, and prove acceptable to the European Union.
As it turned out, the options for doing just that were significantly narrowed even before the result of what would turn out to be a particularly dramatic Tory leadership contest was announced. The politician charged with making a start on Brexit by Cameron (who, while obliged to stay on in Downing Street until the end of the leadership contest, was careful to keep out of the race) was Cabinet Office Minister Oliver Letwin. He decided, reasonably enough, that the best way to proceed was to find out straight away what sort of arrangement with Brussels the likely runners and riders wanted. Not surprisingly, perhaps, Michael Gove – speaking (it seemed at the time anyway) both for himself and for Boris Johnson – made it clear that he intended ‘to negotiate as complete a system of free trade with the EU as [was] compatible with (a) the UK exercising control over migration, and (b) the UK being in total control of its own legal system so that the ECJ [European Court of Justice] has no jurisdiction in this country’. Significantly, Theresa May (who, incidentally, Letwin noticed, seemed to be working much harder on her leadership campaign than were her rivals) intimated that she wanted pretty much the same thing.5 In short, while they may not have been able to articulate it even to themselves, the Conservative politicians most likely to succeed Cameron had effectively already decided that the UK would commit to a ‘hard Brexit’: it would be leaving not only the EU but the single market and the customs union, too.
For the moment, however, exactly how the leadership contenders planned to leave the EU was less important than the fact that all those who declared they would stand publicly pledged to respect the result of the referendum, whether, like May (and Secretary of State for Work and Pensions Stephen Crabb), they had supported Remain or, like Johnson and Gove (and Energy Minister Andrea Leadsom and former Defence Secretary Liam Fox), they were well-known Leavers. That did not, of course, mean that the stance they had previously taken, and indeed their conduct during the referendum campaign, counted for nothing. Indeed, it was initially assumed – especially, of course, in the Brexit-supporting print media – that the party was somehow duty bound to pick a Leave campaigner. And since the first post-referendum poll produced could be interpreted as giving Boris Johnson the lead over other Tory politicians, that assumption swiftly led to him being seen as the favourite, at least among voters.
Yet even a cursory examination of the numbers hinted at a rush to judgement. For one thing, some 37 per cent of those questioned about their preferred leader answered ‘Don’t know’. For another, although May, in second place, registered just 13 per cent support, support for Johnson at 28 per cent was not exactly overwhelming. Moreover, when the survey asked respondents who they’d pick if the two went head-to-head, the outcome was 50.4 per cent Johnson vs 49.6 per cent May – hardly a rout.6 Even more worrying, perhaps, for the supposed frontrunner was a larger YouGov poll which came out a few days later. It found that, while the two were effectively (though not very impressively) tied on just under 20 per cent, May led Johnson by 31 to 24 among those currently intending to vote Tory.7
Most alarming for Johnson, however, was YouGov’s survey of Conservative Party members, conducted over the same period. These, after all, were the people (older, whiter, and more comfortably off than most voters, as well as more likely to be male and to live in the South of England) who, it was presumed, would eventually decide who would take over from Cameron – once, that was, MPs had reduced the field to a shortlist of two via a series of votes in which the last-placed candidate would drop out until only the final pair were left to face the rank and file.8 Far from being the frontrunner, and in spite of the fact that nearly two-thirds of Tory members had voted Leave, Johnson trailed May by 27 to 36 percentage points and, even more starkly, by 38 to 55 when members were asked to imagine a run-off between the two. Helpfully, the survey also provided a clue as to why that might be the case by asking members about the strengths they associated with the contenders. Predictably enough, Johnson won hands down when it came to ‘Best media performer’ (62:13) and ‘Understands what it takes to win elections’ (48:21). But May outperformed him as the ‘Strongest leader’ (44:29) and on the qualities required to actually run the country, namely ‘Most prepared to take tough decisions’ (46:18) and ‘Most able at handling a crisis’ (49:18). Indeed, she was also judged ‘Best at negotiating a new relationship with the EU’ (32:22). Finally, May easily beat Johnson on ‘Best at uniting the Conservative Party’ (46:16) – a stunning reversal of the figures a membership survey had produced back in the New Year, when Johnson had the edge over May on that particular question by 42 to 17 percentage points.9
This was crucial. Study after study suggests that the ability to hold one’s party together is, or at least has been historically, the number one criterion employed by British parties faced with having to pick a new leader. And, given how unbelievably divisive the referendum had turned out to be, it is scarcely surprising that many Tories were especially desperate to find someone who they thought stood a chance of healing the wounds rather than rubbing even more salt into them. Allied to this, as a persuasive piece of academic research on the 2016 contest points out, members knew they would be choosing not only their party leader but also the country’s Prime Minister. As a result, competence may well have been seen as more important than electability, especially given the assumption (hardly an unreasonable one) that a steady hand on the tiller would anyway help to persuade the public to return the party to power in an election which, after all, was not scheduled to take place for another three-and-a-half years.10 Johnson, given his charisma and media experience, might well have backed himself to perform better than May in the membership hustings, but he would still have been battling against the perception that what the party needed was a serious politician for serious times.
Of course, these were the views of grassroots Conservatives, none of whom would be able to vote in the contest until the party’s MPs had had their say. But were those MPs really thinking so very differently to the rank and file? Arguably, the fact that the parliamentary stage of the 2016 leadership election turned into something approaching a soap opera, or even, some would say, a tragicomedy, has fed the myth that it was only the supposed treachery of Michael Gove that prevented Boris Johnson winning the Tory leadership three years earlier than proved to be the case.11 Obviously, we should not minimize the significance of Gove’s decision to declare himself a candidate just a few days after promising to manage Johnson’s campaign in return for being made Chancellor of the Exchequer. Clearly, it put paid to both men’s chances. Johnson’s first reaction on getting the news was to declare ‘It’s over’ but he reluctantly agreed to meet with members of his team before quitting. At the meeting everyone agreed to stick by him if he wanted to carry on but he was told that his support among MPs had collapsed from nearly one hundred the night before to fewer than forty that morning. If he pulled out now, no one would ever know for sure how well or how badly he would have done; so, if and when he stood in the future, he wouldn’t need to explain away such a poor performance. It was also pointed out that, in order to justify his sudden decision to stand in his own right, Gove would have no alternative but to spend his entire campaign repeating why, in his view, Johnson was unfit to be Prime Minister. After consulting privately with his then wife for a few minutes, Johnson chose not to stand – at least this time around.12 And, while Gove’s ‘coup’ (prompted, it seems, by a mix of latent ambition and genuine, last-minute doubts about Johnson’s fitness for office) saw him enter the contest proper, it turned so many of his colleagues against him that he was able to win over only around one in seven of them when he was knocked out in the second round of voting.13 However, this should not blind us to the basic truth that Johnson’s decision not to carry on in the contest was less the product of shock (although shock, it appears, may have played a part) than it was of his team crunching the numbers and coming to the conclusion that there was no realistic path to victory when it came either to his Commons colleagues or to the party in the country.
This, in turn, is not to take anything away from the skill with which those around Theresa May conducted her campaign, most obviously her former Home Office advisers Fiona Hill and Nick Timothy and her campaign manager Chris Grayling, as well as Damian Green, Stephen Parkinson, Will Tanner, JoJo Penn, Lizzie Loudon, and Gavin Williamson – the latter now remembered as a clownish Defence and Education Secretary but then best known as Cameron’s Parliamentary Private Secretary and, as such, someone who knew the parliamentary party inside out. May pitched herself as the ultimate safe pair of hands and a ‘reluctant Remainer’ (albeit one who, in private, had wept when she’d realized Leave had won) now absolutely committed to delivering Brexit.14 And she made full use of the organizational, networking, and rhetorical talents of her team in order to overcome her lack of easy familiarity with colleagues and journalists alike. As well as meeting MPs (although resisting the temptation, unlike Johnson, to guarantee them jobs), she (or rather Nick Timothy, who drafted her speech) even managed at her campaign launch to turn what some saw as her lack of social skills to her advantage, claiming,
I know I’m not a showy politician. I don’t tour the television studios. I don’t gossip about people over lunch. I don’t go drinking in Parliament’s bars. I don’t often wear my heart on my sleeve. I just get on with the job in front of me.
Such an approach, especially in the wake of the Gove/Johnson psychodrama, was bound to strike a chord with Paul Dacre, still at that point the Editor of the Brexit-supporting Mail, one of the most influential titles in Conservative circles. And the very next day, its editorial – ‘A Party in Flames and Why It Must be Theresa for Leader’ – delivered in spades, claiming that of all the candidates ‘only Mrs May has the right qualities, the stature and the experience to unite both her party and the country’.15 Surveyed again by YouGov over the following three days, grassroots members appeared to agree – even if Boris Johnson, who declared for Leadsom, did not: 54 per cent of them backed May against 20 per cent for Leadsom, with Gove on just 9 per cent, not that far ahead of Crabb and Fox (who were shortly to fall by the wayside after the first round of parliamentary voting on 5 July) on 5 per cent each. In the survey’s notional head-to-heads, May had the beating of Leadsom by 63 to 31 and Gove by 72 to 21 (with only 32 per cent of members now saying they felt positive towards him compared to the 68 per cent who’d said so before he brought down Boris Johnson).16
Quite how many MPs had these numbers in mind when they voted in the first round, we cannot be sure. But it is hard to believe that they did so with no thought whatsoever as to the likely result of the membership vote. The parliamentary stage, overseen by the 1922 Committee (effectively the governing body of the party in the Commons, elected by backbenchers), proceeds by way of a secret ballot. However, many Conservative MPs publicly declare their support for one or other of the candidates and, if that candidate is subsequently knocked out, then declare who they will be backing instead – declarations which are reported on by the media and often helpfully collated (by way of running totals) by websites like ConservativeHome and Guido Fawkes. By doing so they may be hoping to encourage colleagues to row in behind their choice for leader, which is why endorsements from high-profile MPs are so eagerly sought (sometimes with the offer of a job in a future frontbench team) and also so loudly trumpeted by candidates’ campaign teams. Or MPs may simply have calculated (with the help of membership polling that has swiftly established a good reputation for accuracy) which way they think the wind is blowing – at which point they jump on the bandwagon before it rolls off into the distance, very likely in the hope (in some cases the forlorn hope) of boosting their chances of preferment under what they assume will be the next dispensation.
As well as YouGov’s surveys showing that, going into the first round of parliamentary voting, May seemed to have established a clear lead among the membership, ConHome could, on the morning of the vote, list 124 MPs who were supporting her (compared to 39 for Leadsom, 26 for Gove, 22 for Crabb, and 7 for Fox). It was therefore hardly surprising that the Home Secretary emerged later that day as the clear winner with 165 votes, followed by Leadsom on 66 and Gove on 48. Fox, coming in last on 16 votes, was officially eliminated, while Crabb, although quite a long way above him on 34 votes, decided to withdraw of his own accord – which (at least from the party’s point of view) was probably a good thing given that, less than a fortnight later, he was forced to resign from his post as Secretary of State for Work and Pensions after being implicated in a ‘sexting’ scandal. Both men immediately endorsed May, who went on to increase her vote in the second round two days later to 199 (with 183 public endorsements by colleagues) against second-placed Andrea Leadsom on 84 (and 50 public endorsements).
That second round saw the elimination of Michael Gove, who, with the support of 46 of his colleagues, had actually managed to lose two votes (owing partly, perhaps, to some of his votes in the first round coming from May supporters hoping to knock Leadsom out of the contest and partly to his team’s overly aggressive attempts to dissuade colleagues from plumping for Leadsom).17 But if anyone had assumed that his departure from the stage marked the end of the melodrama, if not the contest itself, then they were very much mistaken, as the role of anti-hero passed from the Minister of Justice to the Minister of State for Energy. Andrea Leadsom, already facing criticism over her apparent reluctance to release her personal tax records and over her supposedly misleading CV, gave an interview to the Times’s ace interviewer, Rachel Sylvester, in which she implied that, because, unlike Theresa May, she had children, she had a more ‘tangible stake’ in the country’s future. Cue a public pile-on which included some sharp criticism from Tory MPs supporting May and which, by the end of a torrid weekend, persuaded Leadsom (who had only entered the contest after a mix-up had seen Johnson, when still a candidate, fail to honour a promise to publicly name her in his putative ‘top three’) to withdraw her candidacy on 11 July.18 As a result, a contest that had been due to drag on until the second week of September was all over in just seventeen days. Accordingly, Theresa May, who formally took over from Cameron on 13 July, became Britain’s fifty-fourth Prime Minister – the ninth Conservative leader to take on the job (and the fourth to do so before winning a general election) since 1945.
Brexit means ‘hard Brexit’
Once again, however, we would do well to tear our eyes away from the twists and turns that led to this faintly anticlimactic denouement in order to gain a more fundamental understanding of the balance of forces inside the party as May assumed the leadership – a balance that would go on to have major implications over the course of her premiership. And we are helped by an academic study which painstakingly worked out who voted for which candidate in the second and final parliamentary ballot on 7 July and then used statistical techniques to isolate what really drove support for each of them.19 Those techniques tell us, for instance, that although May won the support of seven out of ten female Tory MPs, that wasn’t statistically significant. Likewise, whether an MP was privately educated and/or attended Oxford or Cambridge made no difference to whom they voted for.
No contest: May enters Number Ten as Leadsom drops out.
Source: 10 Downing Street.
In fact, the thing that most distinguished those MPs who supported May from those who did not was – not surprisingly perhaps – which side they were on in the referendum a fortnight previously. An estimated 73 per cent of May’s vote came from MPs who had backed Remain and only 23 per cent from those who backed Leave, with the rest coming from MPs who did not declare either way. Leadsom, on the other hand, drew an estimated 87 per cent of her supporters from the Leave camp and just 8 per cent from Remainers, while the figures for Gove were 72 and 28 per cent respectively.
Putting it the other way round, May won the support of 91 per cent of Tory MPs who voted Remain (a group, one should recall, who were in the majority at the time even if most of them quickly reinvented themselves as more or less enthusiastic Brexiteers) as opposed to just 35 per cent of those who backed Leave. Leadsom’s supporters, on the other hand, made up nearly half of those ‘Spartan’ Tory Brexiteers who would go on to vote against the third and final iteration of Theresa May’s Withdrawal Agreement at the end of March 2019 – among them MPs like Steve Baker, Bill Cash, Bernard Jenkin, Owen Paterson, John Redwood, and Theresa Villiers, who were never happier than when sharing their thoughts with journalists. In other words, while May, with the support of 60 per cent of her MPs, had won a parliamentary mandate that exceeded that given to all of her predecessors since 1965, those colleagues ranged against her were a highly motivated, vocal, and reasonably coherent bunch. Unless they could somehow be reconciled, the Conservative Party’s new leader was perhaps more vulnerable than she looked.20
One obvious way that May could reassure, if not necessarily reconcile, the 65 per cent of Leave-supporting MPs who chose not to vote for her was to signal her intention to respect what Brexiteers were already dubbing ‘the will of the people’. And one way of doing that, after dismissing fully thirteen of those who had sat in (or at least attended) Cameron’s Cabinet, was to appoint prominent Leave campaigners to her own.21 Michael Gove may have been beyond the pale: historically, defeated Tory leadership contenders were normally offered a job (one reason, it is often thought, that some MPs with little hope of winning nevertheless decide to put themselves forward); but what was widely seen (by many Leavers now, as well as Remainers) as the Justice Secretary’s serial disloyalty made him, for the moment at least, persona non grata. Boris Johnson, on the other hand, was rewarded – much to his surprise and to considerable consternation in the civil service – for his disloyalty (albeit to David Cameron) with one of the so-called great offices of state, the Foreign and Commonwealth Office. That said, he would not be responsible for negotiating Brexit: that job (at least nominally) was given to another prominent Leaver, David Davis, who would head up the newly created Department for Exiting the European Union (DExEU). Liam Fox was also brought back in from the Cameroon cold and made Secretary of State for International Trade – another portfolio with a direct bearing on Brexit, albeit more potential than actual since no deals with third countries could be firmly negotiated until the UK’s formal withdrawal from the EU. And while May’s erstwhile opponent in the membership stage of the leadership contest, Andrea Leadsom, was kept at arm’s length from Brexit, she was at least brought into the Cabinet, even if only as Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs. Room around the Cabinet table was also found not just for May’s campaign manager, Chris Grayling, who swapped his post as Leader of the House of Commons for the Transport brief, but also for fellow Brexiteer Priti Patel, who – perhaps rather incongruously, given her scepticism about overseas aid spending – was promoted to Secretary of State for International Development, helping to increase the number of Cabinet members educated at state schools and meaning that, of the twenty-two ministers who had attended Cameron’s last Cabinet, only thirteen kept their place at the table (and only four of them the same job).
Sceptics, of course, could point to the fact that, although May had unceremoniously (and perhaps unwisely) sacked George Osborne (who had apparently, if inexplicably, thought she might just keep him on), the majority of seats around the Cabinet table continued to be occupied by MPs who had backed Remain.22 Philip Hammond at the Treasury and Amber Rudd at the Home Office were most often singled out in this respect, since May could defend appointing lower-profile Remainers like Justine Greening (Education), Damian Green (Work and Pensions), and Jeremy Hunt (kept at Health) on the grounds that she needed identifiably centrist, ‘One Nation’ Tories to signal to the public that she was serious about tackling what she had labelled in her first statement outside Downing Street as Prime Minister the ‘burning injustices’ that continued to disfigure twenty-first-century Britain. Brexiteers, though, were prepared, at least initially, to give their new leader the benefit of the doubt – helped, perhaps, by May’s decision to appoint fervent Brexiteers like her former Home Office advisers Nick Timothy (Fiona Hill, also back, supported Remain) and Stephen Parkinson (who led Vote Leave’s ground operation) as close confidants.
Arguably, in her rush to carry out what was not just a replacement of key personnel but effectively something akin to regime change in Number Ten and in Cabinet, May did herself few favours by apparently leaving many of the decisions on the lower ranks of the frontbench (i.e. junior ministers and Parliamentary Private Secretaries) to her advisers and to Gavin Williamson – decisions which, not least because of the manner in which they were delivered, left too many disappointed people on the backbenches who were subsequently disinclined to support her in her hour (indeed, hours) of need.23 Just as damagingly, perhaps, there was also an extent to which even those Tory MPs who weren’t left off the frontbench – up to and including those appointed to the Cabinet itself – nevertheless felt left out since, as May’s Transport Secretary, Chris Grayling, later put it, ‘Nick and Fi had a kind of wall of steel around Theresa.’24
This notwithstanding, Leadsom and other Leave supporters in Cabinet were encouraged to suspend judgement by May’s seemingly uncompromising rhetoric. During the leadership campaign May (or rather Nick Timothy) had coined the tautology ‘Brexit means Brexit’ in order to emphasize that, as she put it, ‘There must be no attempts to remain inside the EU, no attempts to rejoin it through the back door, and no second referendum.’ It was, she went on, ‘the duty of the Government and of Parliament to make sure’ that the public’s ‘verdict’ was implemented.25 But that was little more than a holding position: it bought time (not least for the civil service, which was rather banking on the leadership contest carrying on over the summer so that it could implement May’s machinery-of-government changes and work up some detailed options).26 Something more definite was needed, however, if she were to retain the confidence of her Brexit-ultras on the backbenches.
