A telling moment in today’s urgent question on the IMF’s economic outlook came when Angela Eagle pointed out the dearth of Tories who’d turned up to hear the Treasury defend its performance. She said:
Despite the minister’s bluster, the benches opposite are empty. They haven’t come in in large numbers to defend the government’s economic, er, results, have they?
Eagle argued that this was because the IMF had offered a ‘devastating forecast’ which ‘laid bare the economic incompetence’. But there’s another reason why the government benches were so quiet. It’s that the Conservative party machinery simply isn’t working very well.
Normally when there is an awkward session looming in the House of Commons, the whips and some Parliamentary Private Secretaries will organise a support group of MPs to come along and make helpful sounds from the green benches. These MPs will ask questions to allow the minister to catch their breath in between attacks from opposition MPs. ‘Support groups’ were formalised under David Cameron and George Osborne, with the Treasury Support Group in particular being a popular and noisy group of loyal (and ambitious) backbenchers who would meet before to work out their attacks on the opposition, as well as sharing ideas for supportive questions. It got to the point where membership of the TSG was considered so beneficial to one’s career that it was quite hard to find a backbencher who wasn’t in it.
That’s all fallen by the wayside in the years since. Support groups still exist but largely in the form of WhatsApp groups. They’re too large and leakable for proper political plotting and besides, most MPs are in so many WhatsApp groups that they’ve muted the majority of them. The Tory whips, similarly, will send a message around MPs when the chamber is looking a bit sparse and ask if a few could pop in to show their support for an embattled minister.
None of the Tory backbenchers I’ve spoken to this afternoon received any such message before or during the Urgent Question. So when Eagle asked her question a little more than ten minutes after the question had started, there were no more than a dozen Tory MPs sitting down. James Cartlidge, who had been sent into the Commons to answer on behalf of the Chancellor, looked over his shoulder at the smattering of colleagues, and said he was ‘pleased to say there is very… colourful support on our backbenches’. He was presumably referring to Michael Fabricant, who had taken the trouble to turn up and ask a question. Most of his colleagues hadn’t.
Does this matter? The reason the support groups started was that ministers, particularly Osborne, saw the chamber as being part of a constant battle to keep the Labour party in its place. Back then, with the opposition newly smarting from losing an election, it was easier for the Tories to pin the blame on Labour for anything that went wrong. Now, with Labour looking more likely to win the next election than the Conservatives, you’d expect them to be fighting even harder than Osborne’s lot. Instead, they seem to have less fire in their bellies than a decade ago.
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