Evening Standard comment: This is how to stop the Tory party falling apart

Here's a guide to how the Cabinet can stop the Tory party disintegrating.

For Labour, a similar fate is probably now unavoidable. The hard Left have seized control of the commanding heights of the party.

What was significant about the Labour MPs who became independents on Tuesday was that they included people like Chris Leslie, Luciana Berger and Chuka Umunna who were not mavericks and would have happily worked their way up the ranks of a more mainstream Labour front bench. Their departure — to which is added the resignation of Ian Austin from the party today — feels less like the end of a journey and more like the start of something big, organised and new on the Left.

That is not the case with the three impressive female Tory MPs who departed on Wednesday. All are by disposition independently minded. Only Anna Soubry is someone you could imagine in a Tory Cabinet.

But the party high command would be making a huge mistake in underestimating the threat it faces. It would take only five more MPs to jump, and then either the May administration falls, or it has to enter into a supply-and-confidence arrangement with the very people who felt driven from its ranks.

Then these independents can play hardball and follow the example of the DUP and demand a set of specific policies.

Heidi Allen wants to see changes to welfare policy; Sarah Wollaston has some excellent ideas such as extending the sugar tax. They could even chuck in a request for cash for their constituencies — why should the Ulster version of Tammany Hall politics be the only beneficiaries of the whips’ cheque book?

If they’re being really difficult, why not demand a say over the budget? If they can swell their numbers to eight, these Tory independents can insist on almost anything — for Mrs May has nowhere else to turn.

Stop the deselections

That she finds herself so vulnerable is a situation entirely of her own making.

She was the one who called the election, ran the disastrous campaign and wrote the dire manifesto that lost the majority David Cameron had won.

She is the PM whose sectarian approach, allowing her toxic advisers to trash the moderates and court the hard Brexiteers, created a party so unappealing to centrists that not one of the Labour MPs who couldn’t stand the Corbynistas was tempted to join the ranks of her Government.

When you understand that Mrs May’s chief rebels are people who should have been natural allies — such as the unfailingly reasonable Oliver Letwin, the urbane, progressive Nick Boles and the rational centrist Dominic Grieve — you realise just how badly she has mishandled her leadership.

Is it too late for her Cabinet to take control and change course? No.

Here’s what they need to do. Step one: stop the deselections. The capable party chairman can do it. Summon the constituency officers to CCHQ, dispatch a vice-chair to the AGMs, or if necessary suspend the local party. Deselecting MPs for their views or their alleged “loyalty” will encourage Ukip entryism, propel defections and destroy a broad-based Tory party.

Step two: stop turning a blind eye to the vitriol heaped on moderate Tory MPs who don’t take the Brexit hard line and stand up to those who have poisoned our politics with their talk of “treason” and “enemies of the people”. When has Mrs May ever done this? Her Cabinet should take the lead if she will not.

Step three: remove the self-immolating threat of a no-deal Brexit. It has nothing to do with the non-existent negotiations with the EU. It is holding the nation’s security and prosperity hostage to appease Brexit extremists. If the PM won’t put country before party, the Cabinet, led by the Chancellor, should step in next week and do it for her.

Step four: Mrs May should announce that the next party conference will be her last. It was obvious after the last election that she couldn’t fight another, as she now concedes. The longer she stays, the more her Government morphs from a collegiate effort into a collection of individual leadership contests.

Step five: dust down Mrs May’s nasty party speech from 2002 and get the Cabinet to read it. It will be a reminder to ministers that when the Conservative Party abandons modern Britain, modern Britain — and some of its own MPs — abandons the party.