We are now seeing how the Tories prize loyalty above all else

Yesterday's manoeuvrings within the Tory party are some of the most bizarre I have ever witnessed in all my time following politics.

For Michael Gove who had been seen as one of Boris Johnson's key allies and a likely future Chancellor under a Johnson premiership to suddenly abandon his colleague, denounce him and announce he would be standing himself was extraordinary to watch. Then Boris, showman to the end made a speech peppered with references to Julius Caesar's Brutus and where in its denouement he withdrew from the leadership race using the carefully calculated phrase we have seen repeated on all media outlets: "..in view of the circumstances in parliament that person cannot be me.".*

It is becoming clear that Gove is now himself a busted flush having first brought down David Cameron's premiership (along with Johnson) and then latterly turned on Johnson and brought down his leadership ambitions too. There are lots of Tory MPs shocked by this behaviour and although politics is a dirty business I think there are now simply too many who will not want to be seen to reward this sort of behaviour. It's possible now that Gove doesn't even make it to the final ballot of members. He may even, if reports today are accurate withdraw from the race and throw his weight behind Theresa May who is now the clear front-runner and very likely to be the next Prime Minister.

Nothing is certain but May is 4/11 with Betfair with Gove at 19/2. For the rest of this post I am going to assume that Theresa May will now win.

Because in reality that fits the pattern of almost all the Tory leadership campaigns that I have witnessed as an adult. Right through from the one that followed the fall of Margaret Thatcher.

In 1990 Geoffrey Howe dropped his bombshell as he resigned from Thatcher's cabinet and Michael Heseltine responded to his clarion call that "The time has come for others to consider their own response to the tragic conflict of loyalties, with which I myself have wrestled for perhaps too long." by challenging Thatcher for the leadership directly. As we all know his bid failed and instead the hitherto ultra-loyal John Major who had rapidly risen through the ranks to have recently become Chancellor of the Exchequer won the crown**. Heseltine was widely seen as having been punished for his disloyalty. This is despite the fact that the majority of Tory MPs knew that Thatcher was finished anyway, they did not want to reward Heseltine for having been the one to actually bring her down.

In 1997 after the Tories lost the general election the subsequent winner was William Hague. He had been very loyal to John Major all throughout his travails in the 1990s and was appointed to the cabinet after John Redwood had quit in 1995 order to challenge Major. He was seen as a trustworthy pair of hands to guide the Conservative Party through a difficult time. Redwood was eliminated in the second ballot, another victim of the Tory Party's dislike of disloyalty.

In 2001 the story was a little bit different and deviated from the norm in that the winner in the end was Iain Duncan Smith who himself had been a serial rebel in the 1990s against John Major's government. Duncan Smith was actually the beneficiary of the fact that he ended up in the final ballot against Ken Clarke who as a Europhile was wildly out of touch with the Tory membership who by now had the final say when the MPs had whittled the field down to two. This aberration however was short lived as the party rapidly realised they had made a mistake selecting Duncan Smith not least because it was very difficult for him to credibly demand loyalty from his parliamentary party after all the times he had failed to do the same thing himself under Major. So in 2003 without even a leadership election the Tories got rid of Duncan Smith through some back-room shenanigans and replaced him with Michael Howard the former Home Secretary who himself had been (publicly) loyal to Major in government thus ending the experiment of allowing a former rebel to lead them.

2005 saw another loyalist David Cameron push through the field to emerge victorious. Cameron in fact is the epitome of a loyal party member having devoted much of his life to working in the engine room of the Tory Party before he became an MP first in Central Office and then as a special adviser to Norman Lamont and Michael Howard. Indeed he and George Osborne used to help out prepping John Major for PMQs during the 1990s.

And so to the current leadership contest 11 years on. Given the history of how the Tory party selects its leaders and the disaster that befell it the one time it deviated from this norm and selected someone who was widely seen as disloyal it is looking like once again that rather than the showboating politicians and/or the ones who have been willing to publicly betray the party leadership it will be the quiet, unassuming but publicly loyal Theresa May who will win the ultimate prize.

There is almost certainly a lesson in here for future aspirant Tory leaders. Keep your head down, get on with the job and no matter what you might really think, always, always swear absolute loyalty to your leader.

It's the Tory way.


*As an aside this debacle shows how wrong I was when I wrote the other day that it was most likely to be Boris Johnson who won the leadership. I should have adhered more closely to what history tells us myself! I'll be more careful in future for sure.

**It's worth noting that Major was able to "have his cake and eat it" when it came to Thatcher's nomination for the first round of the leadership ballot. Thatcher's team had wanted Major's signature on her nomination papers as he was Chancellor and that would add weight to her bid. But Major did not sign her papers as at the time he was under anaesthetic having dental surgery. Hence he was able to both profess loyalty and simultaneously not dirty his hands by directly backing her. This contributed to his success in the second round and will perhaps go down as the luckiest dental problem in political history.

William Hague will not address #ldconf - but maybe he should

The Daily Mail today has a story that William Hague is to address the Lib Dem conference next month:

The Foreign Secretary, widely seen as one of the best orators in the Commons, is expected to lead a Conservative charm offensive at the gathering in Liverpool in the hope of winning over disaffected LibDem activists.

Tory sources suggest Mr Hague will give a 'witty' address, rather than focusing heavily on policy.

However according to a Cowley Street source that has got in touch it aint true:

William Hague is not part of the conference agenda and I can confirm that he has not been asked to speak at the Liberal Democrat conference. No Conservative ministers have ever been approached to speak at our conference.

Fringe events are still being finalised, and it is of course possible that an independent group may have invited Mr Hague to speak at their Fringe event. But this is no different to any other year and it is common for MPs of all parties to attend these events.

But maybe Hague should be invited to address the main conference. It would not be as high profile as getting David Cameron to address it which may be a good thing and if anyone can leaven the situation with genuine humour (rather than what often passes for politician's humour) whilst still making a good speech it would be Hague. He is by common consensus one of the best communicators of his political generation.

I guess after the rebuttal it is unlikely that any Conservative will address the main conference and that any blue presence will be confined to the fringes.

Is this what Boris is going to be like in the next few years?

I was amused to hear on the radio that Boris Johnson has waded into the BP situation by attacking American "anti-British rhetoric". He also said that the company was paying a very, very heavy price for the consequences of an accident and that UK pension funds had a “huge exposure” to BP

His words have a distinctly off-message tone and he is clearly positioning himself as the champion of the British underdog. Of course as Mayor of London he is not subject to the same diplomatic strictures that his governmental colleagues are. David Cameron might well agree with him but he cannot say so. He has to maintain relations with Obama and the US administration. William Hague for example has had to come out and say that he cannot detect any anti-Britishness in a clear rebuttal of Johnson's comments.

You can imagine senior Tories rolling their eyes in frustration at the fact that "good ol' Boris" is chipping in like this with his "voice of the people" act. After all, "He says wot the people are finkin' innit?".

We can expect to see much more of this sort of thing as Johnson continues to carve out his niche in anticipation of an eventual triumphant return to parliament and we can only presume a bid for the leadership at some point.

Of course then, episodes like today may come back to haunt him...

PR is not to blame for BNP Euro wins

Like many others this morning I am sickened by the fact that the BNP has won two seats in the European parliament following the count overnight. I had to endure the sight of fascists being interviewed on TV knowing they now have a 5 year elected platform from which to espouse their hate as well as all the funding that comes from the result.

I have already seen that William Hague has been on the radio this morning trying to argue that Proportional Representation is to blame for the result.

I completely reject that argument. The BNP has got in in Yorkshire and the North West because of a combination of disgust in general with the political classes and especially Labour. They got almost 10% of the vote in Yorkshire and 8% in the North West. The unpalatable fact is that a lot of people in those regions were willing to vote for them.

But the biggest argument against blaming the electoral system is that it is precisely the First Past the Post system used at Westminster that has contributed so much to this problem in the first place. Voters feel disengaged from politics and great swathes of the North West and Yorkshire are safe seats where there is usually little campaigning from any of the major parties as they instead focus their energies on marginal constituencies. This lack of political activity and engagement creates a vacuum that parties like the BNP can then move into. If we had a fairer electoral system for Westminster, these politically bereft areas would have much stronger campaigning machines on the ground from the major parties and the BNP would have been unlikely to get any MEPs as a result. I have heard anecdotal evidence that in some areas, the only leaflets people received were from the BNP. This is a shocking indictment of the lack of campaigning capacity of the bigger parties and is a direct result of the broken electoral system we use in our country for Westminster elections.

So if anything last night's results are an argument for wholesale reform of our electoral systems used in all elections.

Am I becoming one of them?

Watching The Daily Politics earlier today and their coverage of PMQs where the deputies stood in, I thought that Harriet Harman did quite well and managed to skewer Hague a couple of times with well chosen political points (apparently he has taken £30,000 from RBS for public speaking recently and also used some of his own words about deregulation when he was Tory leader against him). Sure, she was a bit stumbly but no worse than many I have seen at the despatch box and even Hague stumbled over his words a couple of times.

But during the discussion afterwards, most of the public who had contacted the show thought she had done really badly and that Hague had won hands down. The consensus among the pundits was that she had done quite well and certainly done her incipient leadership bid now harm. Andrew Neil questioned if that is the Westminster bubble insiders view and people outside see things very differently.

Does this mean I am now thinking as if I am inside the Westminster bubble!?

William Hague's Outside Interests

I have been following the story about shadow cabinet "extra curricular activities" and in particular Shadow Foreign Secretary William Hague's attempts to spin this fact in his favour.

He has claimed that pursuing outside interests makes him a better politician (see here). I have also heard others make the point that the end game of banning MPs from having outside interests is the sort of anodyne automatons you get such as David Milliband who have never done anything but politics. I do take this point to a certain extent. However I have to say that the way some of the shadow cabinet (including Hague) are behaving makes it look like they are not hungry for power. As an active campaigner myself, I know there are thousands of people in this country who would give their eye-teeth to be in a position where in 18 months time they have a reasonable chance of being in the cabinet and they would be doing everything in their power to prepare for that. Not swanning around giving after dinner speeches at £15K a pop.

Now I like William Hague, a lot. He is one of my favourite Tory politicians. I think he was dealt a terrible hand in acceding to the leadership when he did (although he was warned) and deserved a better result in 2001 than he got (although as he drifted to the right, forced by his rump of a party it was inevitable). He is a fantastic commons performer and seems naturally funny at the despatch box which you cannot say about most MPs. However he is damaging his party and politics in general by making it seem like it is not that important. Aspiring to the third greatest office in the country should not be trivialised in this way.

My view is that of course I want to see MPs with more rounded experience - indeed I have only just got involved at the age of 34 after many years in industry and having started and run my own business for several of them. However I feel this would be better achieved by encouraging local parties to ensure that having life experience was a more important part of the selection criteria for parliamentary candidates. Also, perhaps raising the age at which people can become MPs to ensure there will be more experience is an idea that I think warrants some debate. Overall I think the experience should come before the MP gets into parliament. Once he or she is there, they should be concentrating on the job. They still very much keep in touch with things on the ground through constituency work but a strong grounding through having had a non-political job for a number of years first (and by this I don't mean working as head of PR for Carlton TV!) will be a great foundation for most people aspiring to become MPs.

I am sorry to say that I do not buy Hague's "it makes us more rounded" argument. I think he is mainly doing it for the money and that saddens me. He will have plenty of opportunity to make money after he leaves office. Most senior politicians (especially of his calibre) can look forward to all kinds of non-executive directorships, speeches on the after-dinner circuit, money for memoirs etc. and a big fat parliamentary pension. They do not need loads of extra money earned whilst in office or parliament.

If Willaim Hague wants to prove me wrong, there is a simple way to do this whilst still maintaining what he claims is the necessary outside experience. I have not heard any commentator or interviewer suggest this but he could donate all the money he makes from these outside interests to charity.

I won't hold my breath though.