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.

David Cameron is now weaker than John Major

I'm not even talking about the fact that he has not been able to persuade his backbenchers to support a key plank of the coalition agreement, although that is pretty weak.

I'm referring to how he has steadfastly refused to move George Osborne from the Treasury brief. It has demonstrated just how hidebound his political room for manoeuvre has become.

I understand those who say Osborne is one of Cameron's oldest political friends. But Blair was old friends with Peter Mandelson and David Blunkett and he did what was necessary to remove them from their cabinet posts when the time came. And even John Major had the guts to remove Norman Lamont as Chancellor when it became clear he was a political liability in that role.

Most observers agree that Osborne has performed poorly as Chancellor. His budget earlier this year was a political disaster. Worse, Cameron knew it would be (specifically regarding the reduction of the 50p rate - he didn't want to do it) but gave Osborne enough rope to hang himself with. Now that he has done so, instead of letting him swing he has cut the rope and is giving him his undeserved political support.

Even worse still, other Prime Ministers just over 2 years into a parliament would likely have at least one more chance to remove an errant minister as reshuffles can be fairly frequent when one party is in power. But the nature of the current coalition makes it pretty unlikely there will be any more reshuffles before 2015. So this is the one chance that Cameron has to put someone politically and economically competent into No 11 (e.g. Philip Hammond) and he has flunked it.

Prime Ministers need to have a shaft of steel running through them. No matter who were close allies on the way up, a politician that wishes to retain power needs to be unsentimental about friendship. That he feels unable to do anything about Osborne demonstrates how weak he has now become.

When even John Major was able to do things you cannot it is surely time to think long and hard about your long term political strategy?

I've realised what's been really bugging me...

Over the last few weeks, as the Government's situation has gone from bad, to worse, to diabolical there has been something in the way that Gordon Brown and other ministers have tried to defend him and their position that has been really niggling away at me and I have realised what it is.

Almost every defence that you hear has an implicit (and sometimes explicit) assumption that only Labour can govern. That it is only Labour and Gordon Brown who in fact have any right to govern.

I have heard Gordon Brown himself respond to questions about whether he should stand down with phrases like "No, because we need to do x to fix y problem" or "We are tackling the problems with the economy". It is as if nobody else and no other party could possibly even be considered able to govern at all.

Now, of course that's politics. You position yourself as the answer and try to paint your opponents as the opposite. However I just get the feeling with this lot that they have reached the point where they have been in power for so long that they genuinely think they are the only ones who can do it.

I have a long enough memory to remember what things were like under John Major towards the end of his reign. I recall (although I cannot find a link to it) some government adviser or somesuch resigning in about 1996 and getting into the papers by talking about how the Conservatives seemed to feel that they had "a divine right to govern". I also remember john Major in the run up to the 1997 election in a rather odd admission that he was going to lose publically offerring to train Tony Blair in how to handle European conferences. It showed that Major really felt that nobody could do it properly but him.

This is arrogance of the highest order. Gordon Brown should put himself in the shoes of himself from 13 years ago and remember how scornful he was of such claims from the then moribund Conservatives. They need much better reasons for people to vote for them than "we've been in for a while and others aren't up to the job". That is an argument for perpetual incumbency and as Major found out in 1997, it doesn't work. It just makes the "Time for a Change" argument resonate all the more.

Is Alan Johnson the new John Major?

I am not buying this "man of the people" ordinary bloke stuff from Alan Johnson. I just caught his interview on the Politics Show where he tried to make out that he has no ambition beyond his current role and is loyal to Brown.

The thing is, you don't get Alan Johnson's CV without having a driving ambition to get places. He worked his way up to General Secretary of the Communication Workers Union and was also on Labour's NEC where he was the only Union leader to support the abolition of Clause 4 (he must have had an eye on a parliamentary and ministerial career under Blair at this point surely - that shows ruthless ambition to break ranks and go against the grain of his fellow Union leaders). He was then selected for the safe seat of Hull West and Hessle. It is no mean feat to be selected for a safe Labour seat at the first time of asking. He is clearly a very smooth political operator.

His ministerial career has been pretty epic too having held 5 cabinet positions now in less than 5 years and steadily climbed the ranks to one of the 4 great offices of state.

In fact in many ways he reminds me of John Major. He too had an meteoric ministerial rise in the space of a few years and when Thatcher fell, despite similar protestations of loyalty up to that point he was able to throw his hat into the ring and appear to be the unity "man of the people" candidate. The parallels are striking with Mr Johnson now.

The thing he said during the interview that absolutely convinced me that this is game on is when he made clear that he has never mapped out his political path to number 10 on the back of a "fag packet" and he explicitly said "like Heseltine". Why else contrast yourself with Heseltine unless you want to appear to be positioning to do what he never managed, accede to Number 10?

He will be a formidable candidate if Brown falls in the next few days or weeks.