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LONDON — Britain’s center-ground Conservatives are looking for a flag bearer. They haven’t found one yet.
With dire poll ratings suggesting the ruling Tories are heading for electoral defeat this year, Westminster’s attention is focused on who might be tasked with turning the party’s fortunes around after polling day.
Few believe Prime Minister Rishi Sunak would want, or be allowed, to stick around as leader if the predicted drubbing comes to pass, leaving the Conservatives facing a fifth leadership contest in eight years.
And with one eye on the United States, Tory MPs in what used to be considered the mainstream center are desperate to avoid a populist takeover along the lines of Donald Trump’s capture of the Republican party.
Members of the so-called “One Nation” liberal Conservative caucus have begun mobilizing behind the scenes, but have come across a stumbling block: a lack of an obvious leader.
Named from a phrase in a speech by fabled 19th century Tory Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli referring to the party’s ambition to represent “one nation” rather than a particular class or interest, the group began as a dining club in the middle of the last century. Post-Brexit it morphed into a vehicle aimed at keeping the Conservatives in the center ground.
In the looming battle for the soul of the party, discussions about a potential candidate have already begun.
The candidates
One moderate MP, granted anonymity to speak candidly about internal party matters like others in this piece, said Portsmouth North MP Penny Mordaunt had recently been talked up as an option for the One Nation grouping to support.
Mordaunt, who serves as leader of the House of Commons in Rishi Sunak’s government, came third in the previous leadership contest, narrowly missing out to the right wing Liz Truss, and has since raised her profile due to her prominent role in King Charles III’s coronation last year.
But other moderates tout Home Secretary James Cleverly, Defense Secretary Grant Shapps and Security Minister Tom Tugendhat as potential candidates.
All four are perceived to have drawbacks, however.
“I have no idea who the moderate candidate is,” one current minister said. “Penny [Mordaunt] is good and well-liked, but she’s mad on the woke stuff,” referring to Mordaunt’s support for trans issues.
Cleverly is “the obvious unity candidate,” according to a former minister, who also points out, however, that the home secretary may have thwarted his chances with a series of gaffes. “Now how do you feel about the guy who likes rohypnol?” they queried — a reference to a joke Cleverly made at a Downing Street reception made about spiking his wife’s drink with a date rape drug. He later apologized.
The same ex-minister said they felt the relatively low profile Tugendhat would want to throw his hat in the ring only if he “felt he had a really good shot.”
The Kemi question
MPs on the right have already been noisily making the case for their brand of Toryism. Speaking last week at the Conservative Political Action Conference near Washington DC — a key annual event in right-wing US politics — ex-Prime Minister Truss urged Donald Trump pal and Brexiteer Nigel Farage to join the Tories and “help turn our country around.”
The party’s perceived drift to the right has led to another potential candidate getting second looks from the One Nation grouping.
Business and Trade Secretary Kemi Badenoch, not previously considered a moderate, now appears more liberal compared to, say, Suella Braverman, the former home secretary who this week suggested the British way of life was under assault from “Islamists” and “extremists.”
“She is seen as of the right, but in a world where you have Suella wandering around swinging the bat, she now looks a moderate,” a second former minister said.
A second current minister described Badenoch as a “brilliant intellectual,” but like the other candidates they saw drawbacks.
“She has the intellectual depth Liz Truss doesn’t. But she’s too sharp all the time and lacks emotional intelligence. She doesn’t know how to make people feel good and that’s needed in an arena full of big egos,” the current minister added.
The second former minister quoted above also questioned if Badenoch, at 44 an MP for less than seven years, was “quite ready” to step into the prominent role of leader, likening her to a “young beaujolais nouveau.”
Who’s left?
With an election looming, none of the One Nation members’ preferred candidates have indicated they would stand in a future leadership contest, and there remains a lack of certainty over who will even be an MP after polling day.
Constituency by constituency polling by YouGov earlier this year suggested both Mordaunt and Shapps could lose their seats in a Labour landslide, and so could a raft of the potential supporters of the various candidates.
Under Tory party leadership rules, MPs whittle potential candidates down to a final two, who then make the case to grassroots Conservative members; they then have the final say on the next leader.
Tim Bale, professor of politics at Queen Mary University of London, who did a study on the future shape of the Conservative Party, believes the composition of moderate versus right-backing MPs after the election could be similar to the current situation, but points out MPs could switch allegiances to a candidate like Badenoch if it looks as though she is winning.
“It all depends on what the landscape is after the election and who is left,” a third current minister said. “It’s possible the balance of MPs between the left and the right remains the same. But it’s also about what the narrative is after the election — who gets the blame for the defeat.”
Global phenomenon
Britain’s center-ground Tories will find little hope in looking for examples abroad of what happens after defeat for a party on the right.
Populist former U.S. President Trump stormed the Republican primary in 2016 in the wake of the party’s second election defeat to Barack Obama, and has left the more moderate Nikki Haley trailing in his wake in this year’s contest.
In Australia, the center-right Liberal Party reacted to its 2022 defeat — its worst result for 39 years — by electing ex-Home Affairs Minister Peter Dutton as opposition leader. The party’s wipeout meant few MPs from the moderate faction remained.
Dutton — who opposed the legalization of gay marriage and once infamously joked about the effects of rising sea levels in the Pacific Islands — spent much of 2023 campaigning against the failed referendum to enshrine Aboriginal rights in the Australian constitution.
Canada’s Conservative Party picked Pierre Poilievre as its leader in 2022. He has railed against “elites,” “gatekeepers” and “woke culture” and been a supporter of the “Freedom Convoy” trucker anti-mask, anti-vax, anti-government protest which occupied the center of Ottawa.
Killer instinct missing
When it comes to seeing off the right in the U.K, some doubt the One Nation caucus has the killer instinct of its rivals, with the second former minister warning there is a “squeamishness about division.”
“We don’t need the Montagues and the Capulets. We need to stop the civil war and unite,” the former minister said, while acknowledging moderate MPs probably did need to “go in and hussle” if they were to take on the right.
One Nation Chairman Damian Green told POLITICO that “publicly organizing for the next leadership election” was “not sensible in the run up to a general election.”
“I want the leader after the next election to be Rishi Sunak, as prime minister. So I think people who go around speculating and plotting about what should happen after the election if we lose are foolish and unhelpful.”
But privately, other MPs in the group say they are not entirely sitting back and ceding ground to the right, however. Parliamentary candidates have been invited to the group’s social events, in a bid to woo them from the right.
The long game
Some veterans of Tory leadership races, however, see a lurch to the right as inevitable if the scale of the defeat this year is as vast as polls predict.
“When you lose an election having had a decent spell in power, there tends to be, at least in the short term, a lurch towards the more extreme elements,” said former Tory MP Tim Yeo.
He predicts there is a “better than even chance that after a period of soul-searching, and maybe a flirtation … with a very hardline, right wing leader” that “common sense will prevail.”
It took eight years after the Tory defeat in 1997 for the centrist David Cameron to secure the leadership — he went on to win the premiership for the party in 2010.
“I think the instinct of the Conservative Party is always actually in the end the desire for power will lead to pragmatism triumphing over ideology,” Yeo said.
Price to pay
But fellow veteran Conservative Keith Simpson believes any moderate will have to make an offer to the right if they are to succeed.
“[David Cameron] managed to see off the right because some of the right supported him,” he said.
In the heat of the 2005 Tory leadership campaign, when he was struggling as the underdog, Cameron promised to deliver on the long-standing demand of the Tory right to withdraw the party’s MPs in the European parliament from the main centre-right EPP grouping.
The pledge shored up Cameron’s support but ultimately upset French President Nicolas Sarkozy and German Chancellor Angela Merkel, who later failed to give him sufficient concessions on EU reform to stave off the narrow leave vote in the Brexit referendum.
MPs on the right are now calling for the Conservatives to campaign to leave the European Convention on Human Rights.
For Simpson, compromise is inevitable.
“All political parties are coalitions at the end of the day,” he said.
Graham Lanktree and Stefan Boscia contributed reporting.
