OPINION - Tory sleaze is masking a deeper problem — do they still want to govern?

Are you bored of Tory sleaze stories? Most Conservative MPs are. They’re fed up with the way their party keeps tripping over its own shoelaces, wearied of new revelations about senior figures and sums of money their constituents can’t even imagine.

But they also hope their voters are bored. “We aren’t being shouted at on the doorstep by our own supporters, like we were in the worst days of Boris,” says one MP, wanly. “I’m not sure many of them are paying attention or care about these latest rows,” says a senior backbencher, rather hopefully.

He has a point: the reason Partygate was so damaging to Boris Johnson was that it was directly comparable to the lockdown misery that millions were experiencing while Downing Street boozed. Tax arrangements and enormous loans are less tangible, more the sort of thing voters expect politicians to be messing about with anyway.

Johnson — caught up yet again in a row about his finances and jobs for cronies — has also left Westminster and the wider electorate a little less shocked by scandals. There have just been so many, and on such a regular basis. Often incredible stories of appalling behaviour don’t get the coverage or attention they merit purely because they’ve become a commonplace, part of the political fabric.

This is a pretty dismal situation for Conservatives to be in: hoping their voters are bored of their dysfunction or at least numbed to it. And it doesn’t mean Nadhim Zahawi, currently under investigation by the Prime Minister’s ethics adviser over his ‘careless’ tax arrangements, is safe in his job. The Tory party chairman would normally be leading the attack against Labour and taking all the awkward broadcast slots to defend difficult government policies. Instead, he is taking up questions in the Commons.

Zahawi is very popular with most Tory MPs, not least because he was the vaccines minister, and that’s one success they still like to hold up. He has also done a lot of good in Conservative campaign HQ, which is in a real state at present. The party machine lost a lot of staff when Johnson left government and the campaign apparatus is nowhere near ready for an election. Zahawi has been turning that around.

And yet there is now an awkwardness from many MPs towards him. “People aren’t meeting his eye in the voting lobbies, which is actually worse than anything I saw with Boris,” says one Tory. Generally the people defending the party chair are ministers forced to do broadcast rounds rather than a large phalanx of supporters.

MPs have been saying privately that they think Zahawi is doomed and they don’t want to be seen to be backing a ‘dead man walking’. They’ve grown bored over the past year of defending dud policies and people in their party, only for a screeching handbrake turn a day or so later. One MP defending a particularly egregious policy on the radio discovered the inevitable U-turn had taken place while he was in the studio, and vowed never to bother being loyal again.

Support for Zahawi is stronger among the more experienced MPs. He didn’t get to know the most recent intake of members very well: the 2019 bunch had a difficult social landing because lockdown came so soon after their election.

The problem for all intakes of MPs, though, is that voter boredom might not be because people don’t want politics in their lives to the extent it has been forced on them recently. It may instead be because they don’t want the Conservatives in their lives any more.

Labour’s lead in the polls is growing like the beanstalk, and that seems to be more a function of voters being fed up with the Tories than it is a particularly excited groundswell around Sir Keir Starmer.

Labourites know that lead is soft, and their leader likes to warn against complacency on an almost daily basis.

One name missing from this column is that of the Prime Minister. Rishi Sunak has appeared to be a commentator rather than a leader recently, discovering new developments in Tory rows from the papers like the rest of us. He and his top team aspired to bore the socks off everyone when they took over.

The psychodrama of the previous year made boring necessary. But Sunak needs to give his MPs a sense that they’re fighting for the right cause and that he’s got fire in his belly too.

Bored voters are one thing, but a party that’s bored of governing is quite another.