While Tory leadership hopefuls give exalted speeches the central party machine is running on fumes. Guido hears Matt Lane and Gareth Fox, both top-level staff in the Candidates Department, took voluntary redundancy and are out of the door. The same goes for the vast remainder of the team…
The department is naturally responsible for sourcing Tory candidates for election and its representatives get sent to association selection meetings to oversee events. A hiring round is in order shortly but HQ sources say the coffers are rather empty…
Co-conspirators report a large number of CCHQ staff are still off on holiday. Meanwhile, the party’s break clause on its pricey 4 Matthew Parker Street headquarters is fast approaching. Tory bean-counters might be minded to trigger it…
Given the shrunken Tory activist base and the few Tory MPs still remaining are furious with Reform it is entirely unsurprising that the Tory leadership candidates seeking their votes are signaling “no deal” and saying words to the effect that they will have no truck with the catalyst for their general election thrashing. However if the Tory leadership contenders really don’t have a Farage strategy they are going to remain in opposition for a long time. Whilst Reform take votes from all quarters, research by YouGov immediately after the last election shows they took most of their voters from the Tories. That is the reality of the political predicament the next Tory leader will find themselves in.
Half the candidates standing are implicitly saying that they will occupy the same policy ground as Reform on immigration and somehow this will displace their rivals. Guido’s not so sure voters will trust them to execute on the policies better than they did last time. The other half of the candidates say the party must not occupy the same ground and that “elections are won from the centre”. The latter is a centrist’s nostrum that Margaret Thatcher and Boris Johnson might dispute.
There is no evidence that Nigel Farage is going away, he’s been in politics a quarter century and he’s now inside the Westminster parliament. There is arguably as much chance of Reform displacing the Conservatives as vice versa. Some argue that the British political system has a two-party centre of gravity and two-party politics will reassert itself, that may be true, however there is no guarantee the Tories will be one of those parties and the precedent of the SDP keeping Labour out of government for over a decade is not one many right-of-centre voters will relish.
The contenders for the Tory leadership have to articulate a real strategy for what to do about Nigel. Or else Nigel will do for them…
Months of cloak-and-dagger selection drama for the plum Tory seat of Chester South and Eddisbury have come to an ironic end for chicken run candidate Kieran Mullan. After local favourite Adam Wordsworth was dispatched by high command for attacking Mullan as being “parachuted in“, Kieran must have thought he had a free run of it. Local association voters didn’t agree – reserve candidate and daughter of former local MP Gyles Brandreth Aphra Brandreth has got the selection instead. All that string-pulling and he still lost…
The Tamworth by-election gave a whopping 23.9% swing to Labour last night. This seat was nearly as safe as they come for the Tories in 2019, with a 66.3% majority. They’d held it since 2010. In fact, here are twelve Cabinet Ministers who won a smaller majority in the 2019 election:
- Rishi Sunak: 63% in Richmond (York).
- Jeremy Hunt: 53.3% in South West Surrey.
- Suella Braverman: 63% in Fareham.
- Kemi Badenoch: 63% in Saffron Walden.
- Grant Shapps: 52% in Welwyn Hatfield.
- Oliver Dowden: 62% in Hertsmere.
- Alex Chalk: 48% in Cheltenham.
- Michael Gove: 58% in Surrey Heath.
- Mark Harper: 59% in Forest of Dean.
- Greg Hands: 49% in Chelsea and Fulham.
- Gillian Keegan: 57% in Chichester.
- Penny Mordaunt: 61% in Portsmouth North.
No seat is safe…
UPDATE: According to YouGov “Conservative voters think the government has the wrong leader by 46% to 36%, and the wrong policies by 53% to 29% (with 36% thinking both are wrong)
Compared to 2022, when Boris Johnson was still prime minister, Tory voters are 4 points less likely to say the government has the right leader, and 16 points less likely to say the government has the right policies.”
The Tories have selected Nigel Gardner as the candidate for the new constituency of Harpenden & Berkhamsted. His dedication to the Tory party doesn’t exactly have a long history…
Gardner must have forgotten to mention his Labour past – he was the Labour candidate for Tory heartland Suffolk Coastal for Westminster in 2001, and Brussels in 2004 and 2009. He also fought for the Lichfield seat in 2005, in a losing effort against none other than… Michael Fabricant. Fabbers tells Guido that despite their past political differences, Gardner “was rather a cut above the other candidates Lichfield Labour Party usually select”, and “we both found it rather awkward that in the GE hustings we agreed on most things.” Fabbers won with 48.6% of the vote compared to Gardner’s 32.4%…
Now Gardner’s damascene conversion is complete, and he’ll wear a blue rosette at the next general election. Fabbers claims he later met up with his defeated opponent for drinks on the House of Commons Terrace, and they had a “very interesting chat“. Apparently Michael was the one who suggested he joined the Tories in the first place…
Stuart Anderson has been selected as the Tory candidate for the new seat of South Shropshire, replacing current MP for Ludlow Philip Dunne. Anderson moved to South Shropshire earlier this year, having previously claimed he would not contest his current Wolverhampton South West seat for ‘personal and family reasons’. He was also a rumoured name on the long list in Bromsgrove. Wonder what those personal reasons for leaving Wolverhampton could be…
Any ideas?
