Insurrection was in the air in Bournemouth this weekend as MPs and activists descended on the seaside town for a Tory grassroots jamboree. ‘Take control’ was the aim of the Conservative Democratic Organisation’s inaugural meeet, with 250-odd diehards defying the ‘communist barricades’ of the rail strikes to pitch up at the Bournemouth International Conference.
The venue was the scene of Margaret Thatcher’s final conference and the long shadow of the Iron Lady looms large over her greying party today. Most attendees were middle-aged with fond memories of the Thatcherite heyday: of party conferences by the seaside, Mrs T in her pomp, three election triumphs and nights out celebrating in Blackpool and Brighton. This then, was an attempt to recreate all that: a jolly day out by the beach while venting passions incurred by slights both old and new.
Dressed in resplendent blue, the opera singer turned backbencher Andrea Jenkyns got things off to a patriotic start, delivering a rousing operation rendition of ‘God Save the King’. Delegates resumed their seats, clutching bright yellow cards to approve the proposed movement’s goals. The new leadership were spared the embarrassment of having their constitution rejected and we were under way.
Standing on a stage boasting no less than seven Union Jacks, the speech by chairman David Campbell-Bannerman highlighted the tension at the very heart of the CDO: is it an attempt to install Boris Johnson as leader or a venture aimed at bringing the membership closer to the centre? He insisted that ‘we are not enemies of Central Office’ and said that the likes of Danny Finkelstein in the Times are wrong to describe the group as a ‘Tory Momentum’ because they, unlike the CDO, champion specific policies like a four-day working week. ‘We are about democracy not about a manifesto of policy,’ he said, before in the same breath claiming ‘the Times of course was at the heart of the coup against Boris’ and insisting ‘we want to reinsert Conservative values into the party.’ Is that a manifesto or not?
Others were even keener to express their dissatisfaction with the current direction of Tory policy. Lord Cruddas, the CDO’s moneyman, asked the crowd, ‘Are we being moved to being a centre left party or a social democratic party of higher taxes aligned with the European Union?’ His colleague Alex Story said of Boris Johnson’s downfall that, ‘The state essentially led a coup, we’ve seen the first, I think, coup in the history of the United Kingdom and Liz Truss was also subject to a coup.’ To applause from the approving crowd, the onetime Olympian went on to denounce his party’s record:
The Conservative party has been in office for 13 years. It’s not done anything to reduce the size of the state. We have more debt, we have high inflation. We look like we have been ruled by the Labour party for the last 26 years. There’s been nothing Conservative, we still have gender rules. We have an enormous amount of poison injected into our body politic, including our children at school. It’s insane. What have we done? So it’s not just a question of regaining the Conservative party, we need to get the Conservative party in power to implement Conservative policies.
So Boris Johnson was toppled – but he was little better than what came before him. Who then is responsible for these failures? The finger of blame was pointed at different targets from the civil service to MPs in Westminster. For Lord Jackson, CCHQ could not avoid its share of the blame. The arch Brexiteer attacked those involved in the candidates selection process by name, telling attendees that members need a ‘broad church across the whole spectrum, rather than just people who like to read the Guardian and the Independent. We have had too many Guardian reading, tofu-munching vegetarians who should better be in the Liberal Democrats, than real, authentic decent people who represent their constituents properly like Lee Anderson.’ The mention of the Red Wall ex-miner provoked another burst of applause and cheers. Andrea Jenkyns added her voice to Jackson’s call for an overhaul, telling the crowd with a smile that ‘I look around at colleagues and think you belong in the Lib Dems actually.’
The thankless task of responding to all this was given to Paul Holmes, the Tory vice chairman and CCHQ’s man on the spot. He is unlikely to share Jenkyns’ sentiments perhaps, given that his Eastleigh constituency has the Lib Dems as its main opposition threat. Holmes gave an apologetic speech on behalf of high command which ended with a heckle of ‘Sunak out!’ from the crowd – much to the delight of the attendant Labour press officer. That sentiment though largely missed the mark. What was striking, listening to the speeches, was how little the next 18 months seemed to feature in the minds of most attendees who spoke from the floor.
There was, unsurprisingly, little enthusiasm for Rishi Sunak, given the self selecting nature of the crowd. But GB News nevertheless helpfully chose to illustrate this by encouraging delegates to balls in a stand as to whether they would prefer Boris Johnson or Rishi Sunak as leader. Johnson won by a landslide: ‘not the hardest election he’s ever had to fight’ remarked one lady, as she added her ball too. Despite this, there appeared to be a grim acceptance by many, if by no means all, that Sunak will lead the party into the next election – a fact acknowledged by the trio of leading Johnsonites in attendance: Dorries, Patel and Jacob Rees-Mogg, who warned another change of leader would be ‘absurd’.
That doesn’t mean of course that they intend to make life easy for Sunak. All three took the chance to offer their own criticisms of where things are going wrong. Rees-Mogg suggested that the Prime Minister had ‘run away from repealing EU law’ while Patel couldn’t answer when asked by Dan Wootton whether Sunak merely wants ‘to lose in a dignified manner’. That came after an address which one attendee told me ‘sounded more like a speech from an opposition MP than an incumbent government supporter’. Dorries went even further, declaring publicly that ‘we are drifting’ and ‘no longer have that inspirational leader and those visionary policies that people can go out and vote for.’ She listed Sunak’s various U-turns on the Online Safety Bill, social care reforms, the EU law changes and declared ‘we aren’t articulating what the vision and the future of the country is.’
In the evening, the show moved to the seafront for a black tie gala dinner. Over red wine and roast chicken, the blue rinse brigade swapped plans and anecdotes, over the dulcet tones of The Soldiers of Swing of Britain’s Got Talent fame. To the disappointment of some, Boris Johnson did not appear, though he generously signed half a dozen bottles of wine for his supporters to get their hands on. Andrea Jenkyns though was very much there, again obliging with the national anthem to mark the arrival of the starters. For desserts there was Campbell-Bannerman as toastmaster, raffling off Boris Johnson’s book, Boris Johnson’s champagne and an internship with Boris Johnson’s backer Lord Cruddas. Not that this is a bring back Boris event. The New Statesman sadly failed in its bid to bag the game of golf with Cruddas.
If Sunak loses next year, the question is whether his would-be successors can harness the anger of the grassroots. The last time the Tories entered opposition, William Hague won the leadership, pledging to reform the party’s structures. Similar such promises could prove a factor in winning members’ votes in any post-Sunak contest. When Hague won in 1997, membership stood at 500,000; now it is barely a third of that. In a smaller party, the CDO will be hoping to exert an outsized influence. There is a vacuum in the party, waiting to be filled: as obvious as the unclaimed lanyard bearing Boris Johnson’s name at the conference check-in desk. Yet the CDO still has some way to go to be it.
Johnson’s time as the darling of the grassroots has likely now passed: the question is who follows?
Comments