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.

Could David Miliband be the new Neil Kinnock?

Mike Smithson makes the point this morning that it is exactly a year ago today that David Miliband made the biggest decision of his political career when he decided not to follow James Purnell over the top and to instead stand by Gordon Brown.

Mike goes on:

... looking back there was never a better chance for a rebellion against Mr. Brown to succeed but, not for the first time, Miliband held back and the rest, as they say, is history.

Given Labour’s polling performance since Brown’s departure then there’s a good argument for saying that the general election outcome could have been different if he had stepped aside a year ago.

It didn’t happen. Labour lost and now Mili-D is hot favourite for the leadership. Could, I wonder, his decision to back Brown a year ago become a leadership election issue? It certainly says a lot about the man because you wonder whether he’s got the killer instinct.

It probably should become a leadership election issue (it is certainly true that he has demonstrated time and again he does not have that killer instinct) but it won't for a number of reasons:

• The question of "killer instinct" is not generally something that is openly debated. It is sometimes referred to obliquely in code (disguised as "decisiveness", "ability to take difficult decisions" etc.).
• It is very unlikely that the narrative of the campaign will descend into "You should have stabbed our former leader in the back when you had the chance.". None of the other candidates are likely to pursue that line, not least because...
• The two primary challengers to Miliband D are Ed Balls and Miliband E both of whom were very close to Gordon Brown. It would be bizarre to find either of them attacking David on these grounds, not least because they would likely have been in the bunker defending Brown even if David had have resigned!
• Even though an honest appraisal of Brown's dreadful record would be to the long term advantage of the party they are just not ready for it yet. Observer the platitudes about "listening and learning" (were they not listening before the election!?) and how difficult it is for the main candidates to repudiate the record of a government that they were at the heart of until a few weeks ago.

So perhaps the decision that David Miliband took a year ago today to keep his powder dry will turn out to have been the correct one, for his own career at any rate. He has previously been heard talking about not wishing to be the Michael Heseltine of his political generation. It looks like he may well have avoided that fate.

The wider question is whether now is the right time to take the reins with the huge challenge the party faces to renew itself. Because whilst he may avoid the fate of Michael Heseltine, even if he wins the leadership he may instead find that he is this political generation's Neil Kinnock.

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.