The Tories have no good options

As the Conservative party holds its third leadership contest in four years, Britain is not experiencing déjà vu; we’re just stuck on square one. The three frontrunners consist of the previous contest’s runners-up, Rishi Sunak, Penny Mordaunt and Boris Johnson, the man they previously deposed. If insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result, the Conservative party lost its marbles a long way back.

These candidates have already been tested and found wanting. Penny Mordaunt is still a Labour politician in blue clothing, a living representative of your HR department’s moral values and political purpose while still willing to flip between trendy views and crude jokes on trans issues in order to cadge a few extra votes.

Rishi Sunak is still the candidate who walked into the contest expecting a coronation and disintegrated at the first serious opposition. If you are finding yourself struggling with the debating skills and charisma of Liz Truss, politics may not be quite your thing. It’s also worth remembering that Rishi’s essential flaws still remain: Truss’s attempt to announce tax cuts before the policies that would pay for them backfired spectacularly, but Sunak is still the representative of a Treasury orthodoxy that has seen Britain experience a decade and more of economic stagnation.

And as for Boris Johnson, he is still Toad of Toad Hall. He will apologise and claim to have learned his lesson. He will be very contrite. He will be charming, funny, and promise not to do it again. And then, poop poop! He has, once already, alienated his MPs and the public, refused to do anything meaningfully conservative, squandered and whittled away his majority, and insisted that economic growth comes from the government announcing a new policy for levelling up.

Part of the problem is the Conservative party itself, which is now running desperately short of talent. The first wave of losses followed in the wake of the Brexit vote, as the Remain-backing grandees left or turned to the backbenches, ineligible to lead. A second such wave followed as Theresa May’s government sank beneath the burden of implementing the result. After six years of infighting and bleeding talent, there are few candidates who are both talented enough to be prime minister, whose reputations are sufficiently intact to qualify them, and who can command the loyalty of enough MPs to have a chance of meaningfully governing.

Whoever takes over, it looks as though the Conservatives are royally screwed at the next election. If they can engineer an economic boom, then maybe they can hold on to a good chunk of their current seats. But the tight timeframes and the lack of party cohesion needed to actually push meaningful reforms through seems to indicate that this isn’t on the table.

The 2024 election is already almost certainly a write-off. In some ways, this is (if you squint hard enough) almost an opportunity. It’s rare that a party has enough seats to make serious changes without being constrained by the tantalising possibility of holding onto power in the next election. If they really wanted to, the Conservatives could do quite a lot of good for the country by passing unpopular but badly needed reforms now, taking the blow and then, later on, the credit. 

Unfortunately, the reasonable objection that individual MPs would quite like to remain employed means that this won’t happen. Instead, the leadership contest is an exercise in damage limitation; what’s best for the party? As things are, appointing Penny is an exercise in attempting to outflank Labour from the left, while returning Boris would make the party look even less competent than it already does. That leaves Sunak as the least bad option.