Being Nostradamus is nice. But the sad thing is that you only get credit if you really commit to the bold predictions; half-measures don’t count. Nonetheless, here’s an observation that, with hindsight, I’d been bolder on:
“Sunak and Hunt took a fair bit of political heat to resist widespread calls from their Party to boost defence spending at the Budget, only to pull this announcement out of the hat less than two months later. If Downing Street were planning to hold some announcements back until a pre-election fiscal event in the autumn, why shoot this bolt now?
“A straw in the wind, perhaps, that the Prime Minister may yet be considering going to the country over the summer.”
The next day, our assistant editor made the case for a summer election. Twitter was aflutter; the laurels of prophecy were within reach. Sadly, Rishi Sunak waited a month to make the big announcement. So it goes.
Still, the die has finally been cast. The Prime Minister has forgone the certainty of reaching his two-year anniversary in Downing Street, and chosen to go to the country when the party is 20 points behind in the polls.
At least the timing tallies with the analysis above: “Behind the scenes, ministers were ordered to start work on manifesto plans two months ago”, according to the Daily Mail. That explains how we went from a decidedly non-pre-election Budget on 6 March to rather random, sloppily-presented defence announcement on 24 April.
It wasn’t an auspicious start: the rain, the tinny pop music the police only managed to switch off halfway through the speech, the fact that the Downing Street grid yesterday morning led with official advice to stockpile tinned food and bottled water. Overall, the whole thing looks a lot like a loss of nerve: the best time for an early election was May, to coincide with the locals; Sunak seems to have set the wheels turning just after that window closed.
Little surprise, then, that MPs are furious. It isn’t just that the Prime Minister has fired the starting pistol on the slenderest of pretexts: some good headline news on interest rates that has not yet had time to filter through to voters in ways they care about. It’s that, as Tim Shipman reports: “They thought they had 5/6 months to get a job, to plan their lives” – and they don’t. Hundreds of them (and never forgetting, their staff) instead have only six weeks, and six weeks of hard campaigning at that. For those who choose to stay on, anyway.
What about the activists? Well, in our most recent survey less than a fifth of respondents favoured a summer election, versus three quarters who backed going to the country in the autumn or later:
Yesterday’s events won’t have soothed any sore feelings, at least if reports of London activists getting frozen out of Sunak’s first campaign event are anything to go by. Nor will their comrades in the scores of seats which have not selected a candidate be best pleased with the fact that CCHQ can now impose one; Theresa May learned in 2017 how badly that sort of power-grab can backfire, and she started that race in the lead. (All tips on selections to [email protected] gratefully received.)
All in all, it looks like an object lesson in the downsides of taking your entire party by surprise – just as the weakness of the Prime Minister’s main conference policies testifies to the problem of bypassing both his own departments and the wider right-wing policy ecosystem. Cooking everything up secretly in the Downing Street bunker does not produce good results; unfortunately, that is precisely the sort of lesson the bunker best protects its inhabitants against learning.
Nonetheless. With all that said. Conceding that both MPs and activists have just cause to be furious with the leadership… the apparent plan to try and reverse the election announcement via a leadership contest is insane.
For starters, even if it worked no lasting good would come of it. There’s a reason our survey found six-in-ten Tory members opposed to trying to oust Sunak after the local elections.
Unless the Prime Minister could be induced to resign – and he has just set his own Independence Day, thank you very much – there would be no way to remove him without yet another round of internal warfare, in full view of the public. The prize would be a leader whose sole job would be owning the upcoming election result; all the serious contenders to succeed Sunak wisely want to seize the crown only after that guillotine has fallen.
But it wouldn’t work. The internal procedures of the Conservative Party do not trump the prerogatives of the Prime Minister. Even if enough letters somehow went in to trigger a contest (and Sir Graham Brady admitted it), Sunak would still be in office and have the right, restored to him in this Parliament, to call an election.
Perhaps the rebels could try and force a vote of no confidence in his Government… but the result of that would almost certainly be a general election anyway. And if not? A few more months in office, with a caretaker leader, having disgraced themselves in front of an electorate that already favours holding the election.
*There is, one supposes, the possibility that we simply conduct both contests simultaneously, and perhaps defenestrate our leader in the middle of an election campaign. A heavy sacrifice indeed to make in the cause of having something really weird to put in public law textbooks, given what the public would likely make of it.)
Fact is, time is up. The would-be rebels have been trying to put a challenge together for months, without success. They had neither the numbers or a candidate before yesterday’s announcement and nothing good would come of their finding them now, even if they could. One last, self-sabotaging tantrum would simply be grossly disrespectful to the activists who are about to go and give up six weeks of evenings and weekends fighting for those MPs’ jobs.
A rebellion in these next few days would be no mutiny on the Bounty, not least because Bligh was an excellent captain. It would be a mutiny on the Titanic: justified anger at poor leadership, rendered moot by events. The iceberg will not renegotiate the collision.
Perhaps, having been in power so long, some have forgotten that they will surely dislike a Labour government more than any Conservative one, and so accustomed to internecine warfare as to have lost sight of the fact that their real opponents sit on the other side of the House.
The election ought to clarify matters: as John Oxley notes today, it is only by sticking together and fighting for their lives that many MPs have any chance of being returned to Parliament on 4 July. It’s time to shut up – and put up.
The post Mutiny on the Titanic appeared first on Conservative Home.
Click this link for the original source of this article.
Author: Henry Hill
This content is courtesy of, and owned and copyrighted by, http://www.conservativehome.com and its author. This content is made available by use of the public RSS feed offered by the host site and is used for educational purposes only. If you are the author or represent the host site and would like this content removed now and in the future, please contact USSANews.com using the email address in the Contact page found in the website menu.