Cleverly’s mistakes mean he isn’t the Tories’ answer
Here is an unpopular thing to say: this Conservative Party leadership contest, which completes its parliamentary stages this week, should have been allowed to go on longer.
Compare it with the last time the Tories had a great rethink. In effect, though not in formal terms, the move for a new Conservatism began the night Ted Heath lost the “Who governs Britain?” election of February 1974.
It gained strength after the Tories’ second defeat in October of that year. Heath still refused to resign. Margaret Thatcher beat him for the leadership a full year after his first election loss. By the time she took charge, the party already understood her sense of direction.
The equivalent is not true in 2024. The defeat is recent and huge, and the issues are so many that the leadership candidates have not had the chance to talk them right through with the party. I therefore fear the choice of leader will be made for inadequate reasons.
On Tuesday, MPs vote to chuck one; and on Wednesday, they choose the final two.
As a friendly observer without a vote, I survey the contest at a distance and try to take it in stages. MPs often vote in corkscrew ways, but their job should simply be to advise the party members who are the best two candidates they feel they could work with. If the MPs lack confidence in those they put to the party in the country, everything will quickly come unstuck.
So the minimal qualifications for the final play-off include clear understanding of, and honesty about, what went wrong in government and the capacity to show both the parliamentary and voluntary party a path to power.
It is a bit depressing, therefore, that late polls indicate a rise in support for James Cleverly. It is true that Mr Cleverly is, in formal terms, the most senior candidate, having been both foreign secretary and home secretary. Unfortunately, he did not always master his ministerial subjects.
To understand the row that broke out last week about Labour ceding the Chagos Islands to Mauritius, for example, one needs to know that it was Mr Cleverly, when foreign secretary, who gave the issue a push in the wrong direction. He seemed to misunderstand the advisory “opinion” of an international court against Britain as a legally binding judgment, which it never was. From this mistake, the current mess derives.
The Conservative Party does not need a leader who makes such mistakes. In the case of the Chagos, one of the candidates, Tom Tugendhat, the former security minister, has a full grasp of the question, and a firm line on Britain’s rights. The other two candidates are clear on the issue too. Mr Cleverly tweeted “weak, weak, weak” when the Labour Government announced its decision, but I fear that thrice-repeated word accurately describes him.
Mr Cleverly’s top qualification for leadership is his view that the Tories, under him, will become more “normal people”. It is a pleasant thought, and he is a pleasant man, but it is not even faintly enough to deal with the past chaos or to direct the arguments to come.
So far, no one candidate has clearly pulled ahead from all the others with a complete analysis of the problems or a display of magic which compels the attention.
My current impressions are that Kemi Badenoch is the most original and the least reliable, Robert Jenrick is the closest to the world view of current Conservative activists (but perhaps too close) and Mr Tugendhat is the most credible as a leader who rises to the grim challenges our world currently presents.
Hibernian Gray
The departure of Sue Gray is sufficiently exciting for little attention to be paid to her new job. She is off to be “the Prime Minister’s new envoy to the nations and regions”.
It is a strange title. The Prime Minister, after all, is Prime Minister of the United Kingdom and nothing else. He is not Prime Minister of England. How can he have an envoy to the places which he already governs?
The concept is revealing about how Sir Keir sees the component parts of the kingdom (only two of which, by the way, can accurately be described as nations, Wales being a principality and Northern Ireland a province). He seems to intend the gradual breakdown of Britain from unitary state to loose federation.
The Irish dimension is important in his mind, because his school of thought sees the Belfast (“Good Friday”) Agreement as the model for all modern government. The Agreement’s permanent role for the Republic of Ireland could be built on to weaken Britain’s union with Northern Ireland and help edge Scotland nearer to semi-independence.
Ms Gray, who has long-standing, friendly links with Irish nationalism, is thought to share his views. An added subject, dear to Sir Keir (until he decided to shut up about it as an election approached), and to some in Scotland and Ireland, is that, by drawing closer to the “Celtic fringe”, Britain might eventually find a way of slipping back into the EU.
When she was Sir Keir’s chief of staff, Ms Gray was blocked in her extraordinary lobbying for more than £300 million of public money for Casement Park in Belfast, the setting for hurling and Gaelic football, two sports favoured by Irish nationalists. I wonder if, as a sort of pay off, she will be granted it now.