23 May 2019
Please Use Back Door
Boris in next?
By J R Thomas
The funniest newspaper photograph of the week was that of Mrs Theresa May, Leader of the Conservative Party and Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, shuffling onto a platform in Bristol. Not a station platform, though the others on the platform certainly looked as though they wished she would get on a long distance non-stop train. To Vladivostok, say, or Cape Town. This platform was for Conservative candidates running in the Euro-elections, and their enormous discomfort at finding themselves sharing it with Mrs May was sheer joy. The candidates all gave a very strong impression of seeking desperately for the exit door, the stage door, the trap door, anywhere at all rather than being alongside their leader.
Nor did Mrs May seem to find any comfort in being there with them. Apparently, she had just heard from Mr Corbyn that his strange game of tag – or rather, Catch Me If You Can – had grown boring and he wasn’t playing any more. But Mrs M had nothing to say about that, and nothing to add to the sentiment expressed in the bizarre leaflet put out by Conservative Central Office which, as an inducement to voters to tick the Tory box, blamed the parliamentary members of Mrs May’s party – that is to say, the Tories – for messing up Mrs May’s plan to accomplish Brexit.
A couple of weeks ago we advised Mr Corbyn that his opponents are in front of him; his enemies are behind him. Mrs May has obviously got that message. The trouble is that as well as enemies and opponents it is helpful to have allies and friends. Mrs May seems to be down to just one, Michael Gove. Boris Johnson could, although won’t, have a quiet word with her about the value of Mr Gove’s friendship.
Though there is always one senior Conservative that any Tory leader can rely on, Michael Heseltine, or Lord Heseltine as he now is. Sure enough, he did his party trick: when the leader is faltering, give them a good kicking; always to be relied on for the undermining words, Michael. He proclaimed that he will be voting Lib-Dem in the Euro-elections, but, with that temperate humility which is the noble lord’s watchword, said that he would remain a member of the Conservative Party and continue to take the Conservative whip in the House of Lords. The Chief Whip, Lord Taylor of Holbeach, thought otherwise and removed said Whip; what Lord H’s local party in Northamptonshire will say or do remains to be seen.
Not content with his display of loyalty Lord Heseltine also had words of wisdom concerning a new leader for the party of which he is a discordant member. In a separate interview he said that he was astonished by the election of Margaret Thatcher as Conservative Party leader in 1975: “She comes from a certain social background, one step up the ladder of economic success, with it, a lot of the characteristics that you associate with people who’ve just made it”. Lord Heseltine is descended from coal miners and small business owners and made his money initially in renting cheap rooms in Notting Hill and later in publishing, so his insights are from his own strivings. Perhaps he would prefer a leader from the ruling classes – perhaps an elderly life peer from the Northampton area.
But leaving such an unlikely result aside, the Conservative All Runners No-Handicap Leadership Stakes is now underway. We go in one easy movement from the subliminal to the ridiculous at this point. Already there are almost as many declared Tory runners as in the Democrat Presidential Nomination Stakes (to be run next year; twenty two now declared). If the Conservatives used the Labour model of leader selection, it might produce somebody like Jeremy Corbyn – a middle aged white male public schoolboy from the rural hinterlands of the UK. By which we allude to Boris, no further identification necessary, the people’s choice. Or at least the ordinary member’s choice. But the Conservative system does not work like that, the Tory Party having still not quite got comfortable with democracy (see Lord Heseltine, above and passim).
The members of the Parliamentary party will select from amongst their number – and it may be that all of them except Jacob Rees-Mogg will decide to run – two candidates for the party membership to choose between. Now, at the rate the party membership is said to be declining, with more membership cards torn up than Jimmy Savile Fan Club ones, the membership of the party in parliament and the party in the country may be about the same by the time the two chosen ones are paraded in front of the faithful. But assuming there are some members left, there is no need for any parliamentary whittling of the shortlist – the largest single segment of the members want Boris. Which could be a problem. The parliamentary party would seem to prefer anybody but Boris. But could the M.P.’s assembled for such purposes, ignore the people’s choice?
They just might, and really, Boris will only have himself to blame. Firstly, because like his idol W.L.S. Churchill, he has been proved right in his analysis of how to Leave, and being a cleversticks never goes down well with the type of person who tends to end up as a Tory M.P. But secondly, because Boris has never troubled much to ingratiate himself with his colleagues in the Commons. He is not a tearoom man, nor a frequenter of the Westminster bars and dining rooms, and he is regarded as both a plotter and a man not to be trusted with anything delicate or breakable. Worse, he is openly ambitious and very funny. These are traits not highly regarded by his colleagues, most of whom pretend not to be ambitious, and are not noted for their sense of humour, especially when it comes to self-deprecation.
All this applied to Winston too of course, and it was only the extreme peril of the hour that brought him back to the cabinet, and shortly thereafter, into 10 Downing Street. Is there a peril now? Obviously not in the way there was in late 1939, and the peril that does exist applies more to the Conservative Party rather than to the country. But to the modern Conservative M.P. the peril of being swept from office, of losing their constituency seat, no knighthood or peerage on retirement, of perhaps seeing the Tory Party so smashed that it might not this time, as in the past, stagger back to its feet bloody but wiser, is indeed extreme peril. If Boris can save his party from annihilation, reinvigorate the party in the country, bring something new and exciting to the Tory appeal, and demolish the ever growing threat of Mr Farage forming some new party of the right (actually much less likely than might be thought, but we’ll perhaps address that in a week or two) then his colleagues will perhaps be persuaded to hold their noses and nominate him as one of the two.
But before they can start whittling lists and broking bargains, the parliamentary party have one more job to do. They have got to get the present occupant of the job to give it up. She may hint and suggest and conjecture; but still she sits tight, holding in her hand a weapon of mass destruction; the threat of calling a dissolution and a general election. There is a lot to do in the next few weeks; has the Conservative Party got the balls for it?
