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Roula Khalaf, editor of the FT, picks her favorite stories in this weekly newsletter.
Do you want the good news or the bad news, Prime Minister? The good news is that your right-wing rebels have given up trying to remove you as leader. The bad news is that they will spend the remaining months making sure you are held responsible for the impending defeat.
Given the continued poor results of last week’s local and mayoral elections, the admission by Tory conspirators this week that it was no longer possible to remove Rishi Sunak before the election must have seemed like a rare moment of relief. But it was less a capitulation to calls for unity than an acknowledgment of reality: the rebels had neither the numbers to remove him, nor a replacement candidate, nor a serious recipe for reversing the situation if he did the other two conditions did not apply.
But the Tories’ radical right flank – an unholy alliance of libertarians and Faragists – has not given up attacks on the man they now believe will lead their party into the election. Suella Braverman, the former home secretary whose presence in the role represents a stain on Sunak’s leadership, said: “The hole we have to dig out is the prime minister’s.” David Frost, Boris Johnson’s Brexit negotiator, made similar comments: ” Real conservatives must…” . . Prepare for disaster: . . wait for the tide. And then when it goes back, we’ll see what we can grow on the new fertile land that’s left behind.”
The dissatisfied are no longer gunning for Sunak’s head and know it is too late to change politics. Their only contribution is the politics of “I told you so”; Their focus is on establishing a sell-out narrative that will help capture the party after defeat.
The cheek is impressive. This is the same Tory right that worked so hard to impose Liz Truss’s vote-destroying premiership on the country, the episode in which the Conservatives finally lost the electorate. These MPs have not been focused on improving voters’ lives, public services or (for all their posturing) economic growth in recent years – Brexit has proven that. Instead they have despised the center from which most elections are won and pursued an increasingly narrow core electoral strategy, which may be necessary now that they are losing votes to Faragist Reform UK.
They don’t accept that the middle has been lost, not because the government wasn’t “really conservative”, but for the more obvious reason that it wasn’t really competent – and after 14 turbulent years, people are worse off.
And yet the rebellious right cannot help itself, even as it shrinks from a pointless leadership challenge. They don’t want to strike and continue to wound. They are no longer fighting for the election, but are now just trying to get the mainstream Tories, especially Sunak, to turn the defeat into their favour. (As an early supporter of Brexit and Boris Johnson, the Prime Minister is hardly blameless, but he is at least trying to lead a serious government.)
Sunak’s opponents are bolstered by bogus polls and death cult exaggerations, while their arguments are strengthened by the support of all major conservative media outlets – particularly the increasingly nihilistic Telegraph, Mail and GB News. Aspiring heads of state and government are propagating purist alternative policy manifestos and calling for a shift to the right that they know can no longer change the election result, but that could burnish their own credibility.
In the fight for future control of the party, their narrative is that Sunak was not conservative enough, was not tough enough on immigration policy, kept taxes and spending too high and was too sympathetic to the net zero agenda have received.
Such obsessions mean they keep talking about “getting Brexit done”, which is what voters had rather hoped for and most have concluded was a mistake. On immigration, which is a real issue, the right has been telling voters for months that it is being betrayed by the government. How is this a vote winner? However, it allows them to push ahead with their own bogeyman: withdrawing from the European Convention on Human Rights, a policy that they themselves are convinced will revive the Conservatives’ fortunes.
This analysis is a major misinterpretation of the 2019 election victory as a vote for radicalism – in reality it was a vote for stability after the Brexit turmoil, spending on public services and left-behind regions. The Tories are not weakening now because they were too centrist or too right-wing. That’s because their complacency, their rule-breaking, their constant infighting, and their crazy obsessions are failing them on the issues that voters care about.
The fact that the right-wing indictment of Sunak is a travesty of the truth is beside the point. The narrative of betrayal by an enemy within is tempting. And the critics have a point about Sunak’s political shortcomings or his track record. But his strategy of arguing that the economy had turned the corner was always the only viable strategy, even if it too could be doomed to failure.
Sunak has secured the privilege of leading his group toward gunfire, but those who have contributed most to their destruction are the snipers. While the more serious Tories struggle to minimize their likely losses and keep at least one foot on the ground, the right are fully engaged in scapegoating the Prime Minister.
You may be on the verge of losing an election, an argument, and many colleagues, but this is no longer a battle of tactics. It’s a blame game and that’s why those on the right believe our unfortunate Prime Minister has one last service left to perform.