A Very Conservative Crisis- Can the Tories pull themselves out of their own mess?
Next week we get a new Tory leader (and PM). Is it too little, too late?
Britain, it is now generally agreed, is in crisis. The cost of living is growing so fast that even celebrities have started popping up on the news to talk about it, the NHS is in the sort of doldrums usually reserved for the deepest and darkest of winters, strikes are popping up like WI ladies doing a tombola at a village fete, and we’re involved in a proxy war with Russia in Ukraine that looks unlikely to end any time soon. Oh, and we’re shortly to continue our Quixotic quest to irritate our closest allies. Everything, to paraphrase the modern cultural vernacular, is decidedly not coming up Milhouse.
It's very clear that in such a time of crisis, we need the person for the moment. Next Monday, the Conservative leadership contest finishes, and we will be delivered a new Prime Minister. The question then becomes, will they rise to the moment? The early signs are not good. One of the key reasons we might have cause to doubt that they will be our saviour might be that much of the current crisis has come about because of a failure of Conservative thinking, the inevitable consequence of a party that is now suffering a very bad case of “been in power too long syndrome”. Another is the fact that at present, most of the solutions being proffered do nothing to address that flaw, mostly promising either to maintain it, or worsen it.
Before we start looking at that though, there are two points I wish to address, in the spirit of laying cards on the table. The first is how much the current situation has highlighted the inappropriateness of the current methods used for parties to pick their leaders. In common with all the major political parties these days, the final decision on the Conservative party leader is with the party rank and file. The MPs whittle it down to a final two then these get sent out for the final winner to be decided. It wasn’t always so. Back in the day the party leader of the Conservative Party was decided in shadowy backrooms by meetings of party grandees and the Cabinet until the abortive premiership of Alec Douglas-Home, the last member of the House of Lords to be elected PM (though he resigned his seat in the Lords four days into his premiership to take up a safe seat in the Commons). He served as PM for just under a year, putting on a customarily unspectacular display, and invited the 1922 Committee in future contests to arrange a secret ballot of Conservative MPs to select the new Leader. This system continued until 1998, when the current version was introduced.
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