If two Tory tribes go to war, a point may be all that they can score

I apologise to Frankie Goes to Hollywood for cannibalising their infamous lyric but then again I can remember the 1980s and them pretending the lyrics of Relax were about ‘motivation’ and not sex.

As the Tory tribe start to face the return to Westminster, still in the sort of opinion poll numbers that make some of them want to run straight back, there is an uneasy truce amongst them that may or may not hold and could build into a covert, even open war.

I wrote a few weeks ago, and Harry Phibbs did yesterday that the biggest threat to Starmer is maths. What do the numbers say? They are the modern equivalent of omens, or reading entrails, and it should be said, sometimes about as accurate.

It’s no less the case for Kemi Badenoch. It’s not personal about her, it is a fact of modern politics, the numbers can be soulless assassins of any leader, if not all leaders.

I’m glad she addressed this head on in her interview with the Sunday Times this week, because at least we know, that firstly she’s fully aware of it, and what she thinks:

The story I want people to know,” she says, “is that I have inherited a gigantic mess and I’m cleaning it up. And it’s going to take a while. It’s very difficult. There’s a personal sacrifice element to it, because I could have not done it and had an easier life.”

She only put herself forward to lead her party, she says, because she was worried that the party was going to disappear unless someone does something”. Still, today, “the existential risk is there. We either pull it off or we don’t, and it doesn’t matter who the leader is.”

To be clear, she’s not suggesting she stop being leader but the ever present point that some of the Tories existing problems are not down to an individual. The Party has, despite its gleeful trolling critics a few options. Any party should avoid looking like a one man band.

I’m glad she did the interview. I hope she will talk to ConservativeHome soon. Her undeniable distrust of journalists is well known, but it is also a disadvantage. However, as of Sunday we have less to guess about how she views her future – because she’s told us some of it.

 What of the rest? Well MPs have been busy chatting away over this hot summer.

I’ve been told simultaneously she is ‘tough and resilient and staying put’ by some, and ‘she’s toast sooner than you might think’ by others.You’d be surprised how many different versions of both have crossed my path in the last two months.

The latter group I listen to respectfully, but wonder how much they want me to be an unwitting agent of their prophecies. That by relating this sentiment I will somehow, like a Wenlock Jakes, promote the very thing they claim was coming anyway in order to make it reality.

I listen to the former group, including the leadership team, who will be minus the influence of Lee Rowley, in October, with the same respect. Kemi has always asked for time, and had not unreasonably planned on getting it, until Labour’s ghastly first year in Government accelerated the desire for alternatives at a pace she didn’t need or want.

However she told Charlotte Ivers

“All the research we have done shows that it takes about two years for people to forgive a party that has just left office,” she says. “What we need to do is make sure that the party exists and is ready for when people are looking for alternatives.”

It’s only been 14 months since the electoral kicking the party took, 10 months since the leader was chosen, and before we even begin a second year in opposition, with Reform still far ahead in the polls, one of three set-piece moments of potential risk for Badenoch, looms.

She’ll know, frankly as she did last year, that her Conference speech will need to be a strong performance. Last year it was, even if eclipsed by James Cleverly’s, but it did the job of seeing her into the last two, and he wasn’t the other. This one really needs to ‘zing’. To ‘crackle with electricity’ as some last year told me she could.

She’ll have a vital Commons performance, responding after Reeves delivers her Budget this autumn, a budget that will be pored over almost as much as reaction to the last one resonated for a year. I’ve bored people by saying even with a correct priority focus on immigration in the end it’s still the economy, stupid.

It would be a churlish Tory who couldn’t admit her Commons performances have got better. She’s now at least landing the sort of punches Conservatives had remembered, anticipated, but frustratingly didn’t get in her early outings. It’s a lonely place that dispatch box, there’s some who think they’d command it better that might be over convinced of their own abilities. She does, however, have much more to do, and even then Commons performances do not alone, an election win make.

Then there’s the third and arguably the riskiest moment. The elections in May next year. It was as I suggested a pretty torrid few weeks in CCHQ after this year’s local elections where even more hard working and decent Tory councillors were ousted. Here, if the opinion polls are still bad, and the results worse, is where a fight might come.

But before anyone gets angry, or excited, there is something to bear in mind. The two generals who immediately spring to mind, are not necessarily orchestrating an internecine war.

Badenoch doesn’t want any war and is straining sinew to calm nerves and prove she can keep the troops together as one party to the point when the public might want to listen again.

Robert Jenrick, who would be seen as her biggest rival, quite clearly would still like the job, and is straining every sinew to make the public listen to the party, doesn’t control some of those who, possibly for their own career reasons, would prefer him in charge.

He also gets blamed sometimes for cross fire he neither ordered or sanctioned. Some will call that naive but I’ve done my digging.

Besides I’ve been told many times that any attempt to oust Badenoch, and have a coronation of Jenrick, would be met with a challenge elsewhere. Jenrick is out and out favourite amongst the membership in our ConHome shadow cabinet surveys, but he still has work to do amongst MPs and indeed the public.

When it comes to others, it’s pointless denying, and people tend to ask me if I mean Cleverly, since I once worked for him. But the now shadow housing secretary, is Sphinx-like on the topic. I know he has a simple personal rule of backing the captain of the team and I know he dislikes assassinations. He doesn’t currently have ‘a ops team’, and even I don’t know if he’d run again, I really don’t.

Actually there are others in the tribe who might eye any faltering at the top, not as a chance for a front runner big beast but for a newbie – often themselves. The party does have some of these genuine talents, and that’s actually good, but it ignores the reason I cannibalised Frankie Goes to Holywood in the first place.

What would war achieve? A bounce in the polls is unlikely. One of the biggest criticisms of the ‘fourteen years’ was the infighting. You can find, even amongst those who might privately want a change at the top, many who will, either enthusiastically or resignedly, echo Harry Phibbs comment on ConHome yesterday:  

“I don’t think a change in leader would do anything to accelerate the electorate’s forgiveness. A leadership challenge would be a kind of non sequitur. An answer to the wrong question. A displacement activity. It’s not about personalities.”

 Lord Ashcroft’s last focus groups contained this comment on the subject:

“Since the succession of prime ministers was part of what put them off about the Conservatives, none thought another leadership election was the answer (“they need a bit of stability. They were just rotating people in and out”).”

 And yet within his latest polling there is this chart, so the question still hangs.

 

It is still a valid question: how much of the Conservatives current position is down to the Conservative party as a whole rather than an individual and how much really down to just Badenoch? But in a world where that question is valid it is numbers more than MPs that might trigger a change.

Badenoch’s Sunday Times interview makes clear she sees her fight going all the way to an election and proving that polling wrong. The next three months will be a crucial time. If she can push the party back into second, and chasing Reform, the current truce will hold and whispers will get quieter. If not they may emerge further into the open.

Nonetheless, the caveat must be ‘war is a very costly businesses’ – even inside political parties.

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