How many more Tories will announce they’re stepping down at the next election? They need to tell the party in the next two weeks whether they want to do it or not, though there is no obligation for them to share their decision more widely.
I understand that Rishi Sunak and his team have been working extremely hard to convince a lot of wavering MPs who wonder what the point is. Most of them expect their party to go into the misery of opposition at the next election, and don’t want to be stuck in those doldrums. Many are worried that they will be among those who lose their seats in that defeat, and can’t face the exhaustion of the campaign followed by the indignity of losing their job in public. Sunak’s basic pitch to his colleagues has been that there is still a path through to rescuing this, that the party is on the way to fixing the first big problem of the economic turmoil, and that things will start to look up soon.
Even if they still haven’t changed their mind about the election result, many MPs I’ve spoken to about these conversations with Sunak have appreciated his conviction and enthusiasm. They at least want him to lead their party to defeat with the same level of commitment that he stuck with in the first leadership contest, where he was still trying as hard as he could to win over members even when it was nailed-on that Liz Truss was going to beat him. It meant a brief window in which he was the loser before entering Downing Street anyway, and some of his colleagues hope that this means their party will be able to recover its reputation quite quickly, rather than being consigned to years of irrelevance. But that won’t be enough for others, so expect more ‘rising stars’ to announce they’re off to another galaxy.
Today it was the turn of Dehenna Davison, who has only been an MP since 2019 and who, as Steerpike reports here, made clear in her announcement that she basically believes life is too short to remain in parliament. of course, a lot of people outside parliament think that all the time, it’s just that when an election defeat is looming, the many trade-offs that come with being an MP look rather less worth it.
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