As the Conservative leadership contest gets underway, the various candidates are busy talking up their differences. But most of the candidates – from Kemi Badenoch to Robert Jenrick – hold one thing in common: they realise that the Tory party needs to change if it is to recover from its electoral wipeout. A key part of its catastrophic defeat was a fundamental failure of effectiveness and probity in government. But the party is already in danger of making the same mistake in its choice of next leader.
Jenrick achieved the extraordinary distinction of being dropped from the cabinet before he turned 40
We all know that trust in politics and politicians has collapsed. Polling shows it at an historic and alarmingly low level: a survey for Ipsos at the end of last year revealed that only nine per cent of voters trusted politicians to tell the truth, which fell to an even more terrifying three per cent among the population of London. Given this, it seems extraordinary that two of the declared candidates – Priti Patel and Robert Jenrick – were forced to resign from cabinet in recent years after being accused of breaching the Ministerial Code.
Priti Patel (who has stressed the importance of ‘delivery before self-interest’) was sacked as international development secretary in 2017 after holding unauthorised meetings with Israeli officials. Patel was accused of breaching the Ministerial Code’s stipulation that ‘ministers must ensure that no conflict arises, or could reasonably be perceived to arise, between their public duties and their private interests’. Patel said in the aftermath of the row that, while her ‘actions were meant with the best of intentions, (her) actions also fell below the standards of transparency and openness that I have promoted and advocated.’
Robert Jenrick achieved the extraordinary distinction of being dropped from the cabinet before his 40th birthday when Boris Johnson removed him as housing secretary in 2021. He had given personal approval to a development in the Isle of Dogs proposed by publisher and former pornographer Richard Desmond, a Conservative Party donor; the decision was later overturned. It transpired that Desmond had sat at the same table as Jenrick at a fundraising dinner at the Savoy hotel a couple of months before he gave the green light for Desmond’s £1 billon scheme. Like Patel, Jenrick was accused of breaching the Ministerial Code. Jenrick said at the time that his actions had been ‘perfectly fair’ but conceded that he should not have sat next to Desmond at a fundraising dinner before approving the controversial planning development.
We can debate the gravity of each of these individual incidents. But it seems extraordinary, given the low esteem of politicians in general and Conservative Party politicians in particular, that Tory MPs are contemplating the election of a new leader who carries this kind of baggage. It is akin to handing a loaded gun to the Labour party’s spin machine, and a gun with unlimited ammunition to boot.
How on earth are the Tories expected to rebuild a shattered reputation for probity and competence over the coming years when all their opponents have to do is say: ‘Your leader literally resigned for breaking ministerial rules’? It is a nonsense. Worse, it is an avoidable: if we were weighing a black mark from some years past against overall ability and charisma which could be transformative, there might be a difficult choice to be made. But let’s be realistic: Robert Jenrick and Dame Priti Patel. That is not the kind of trade-off we are making. If basic probity and competence don’t start at the top of the party, it is hard to see how the Conservatives make any progress.
This is not just a party political problem, of course. Many voters regard politicians as being all tarred with the same brush,. The new government is unlikely to help matters when the chancellor, Rachel Reeves, tells Parliament later that the nation’s finances are much worse than she expected, having said explicitly in a pre-election interview that she would be unable to use such an excuse to hike taxes. But the final years of the last Conservative government did the party and its leaders no favours in terms of reputation and esteem, and that is an issue the next Tory leader will have to address urgently. Are the likes of Jenrick and Patel really up to the task of rebuilding the party and making it fit to govern?
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