After the next election, Bob Blackman’s role as chair of the 1922 Committee should be much easier. With the Conservative party set to be wiped out across the country, it’s not inconceivable that the Harrow East MP will be the last Tory left in the Commons. It is the only seat in the country where the Conservatives exceed 50 per cent of the vote last year.
Alone on the green benches, Blackman will no longer need to worry about organising no confidence votes, massaging backbench egos, or finding exciting new ways to pledge loyalty to the latest failing leader. He will be the Parliamentary Conservative Party. In which case, one suggests, he should bite the bullet and reach the logical conclusion of his political journey over the last decade: declare the Tories dead and relaunch as the official Yookay MP for India’s Bhartiya Janata party (BJP).
Earlier this week, Blackman retweeted a BJP post celebrating India’s armed forces striking nine targets in Pakistan as part of #OperationSindoor. This is far from the first time that Blackman has expressed his support for Narendra Modi’s party. He attended a UK4Modi car rally in London in 2019 and expressed his support for India’s Prime Minister revoking Kashmir’s special status in the country’s constitution the same year. He has described the BJP as a ‘natural ally for the Conservative party’ and is a long-standing supporter of Overseas Friends of BJP.
The reasoning behind Blackman’s perhaps surprising role as a flying buttress to India’s ruling party isn’t hard to discern. According to the 2021 census, 29.8 per cent of his Harrow East constituents are Hindus. The BJP are Hindu nationalists. Blackman has made the rational decision that, if he wants to keep his seat, Modi is a more important leader to cling to than Kemi Badenoch. His persistence in recent years has turned a majority of 1,757 in 2017 into one of 11, 680 today, and won him the Padma Shri – India’s equivalent of an MBE.
One must admire Blackman’s hutzpah. But as lucrative as it might prove electorally, ethnic minority vote-grubbing is as regrettable when done by a Tory MP as a Labour one. A situation where the Tories become the party of India and Labour the one of Pakistan – or the Tories the party of Israel, and Labour the party of Palestine – will be disastrous for national cohesion in an increasingly multi-ethnic society, especially as the subcontinent stands on the brink of war.
But at least Blackman’s cheerleading for Modi has an electoral rationale, however depressing. It is hard to discern the same in the decision by seven senior Tory MPs to sign a letter to Keir Starmer calling for the immediate recognition of a Palestinian state. The letter was organised by Kit Malthouse, MP for North West Hampshire, where 0.8 per cent of the population was Muslim in 2021. Gainsborough, Dorset North, and South Holland and the Deepings are also hardly renowned as hotbeds of pro-Palestinian activity. Nonetheless, their respective MPs all signed.
As Mr Steerpike highlighted yesterday, Sir John Hayes, of South Holland and the Deepings, is not a Tory MP one naturally associates with the Palestinian cause. Having recently chaired a Westminster Hall debate on the subject for his constituency near-neighbour Edward Leigh, the best explanation is a loyalty to an old friend. Yet it is striking that the signatories were all MPs of (relatively) long-standing – the latest having been elected in 2015, the earliest in 1983. Even in the reduced ranks from which shadow ministerial offices are now filled, none can be considered greasy pole-climbers.
All have seats that would have hitherto been considered safe. But surviving an election defeat as shattering as last year’s can convince those who clung on that they possess a particular form of electoral alchemy. Comforted by survivorship bias, freed from the duties of supporting a government, they have the licence to indulge their own special interests. If they have a personal affinity with the Palestinian cause, now is the time to champion it. A rap on the knuckles from CCHQ is worth little if Badenoch won’t be there in a couple of months. Hence the calls, like clockwork, to bring back national service.
Yet between Blackman’s vote-grubbing, Malthouse’s two-state compromises, and the persistent desire of aging Tories to send youngsters to die in a Donbas cabbage patch lies the fundamental unseriousness of so many current Tories. Striking poses about foreign policy is so much easier than facing the reality of the ‘Scuzz Nation’ collapsing around them, as Gus Carter outlined in this week’s magazine. It’s also less hard work than admitting their leader is a charmless dud marshalling the party into electoral oblivion, and taking the necessary steps to remove her.
Those Conservative MPs who do show signs of life tend to be the most exercised about the pernicious consequences of our crumbling public realm, wild imbalance between foreign policy ends and means, and the dire consequences for our democracy of a dissent into Balkanisation. The inability of their colleagues to follow their example is one of many reasons why the party finds itself in the dire state it is in. Wisdom does not always increase in direct proportion to seniority.
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