The folly of William Wragg has been seized on by those determined to wage a civil war within the Right. Nigel Farage, affecting a moral seriousness which does not become him, denounces Wragg’s conduct as “reprehensible”.
Nadine Dorries fulminates against “Toe Wragg” and takes his misdeeds as further proof of the elaborate conspiracy theory she has concocted to explain the downfall of Boris Johnson.
Richard Tice, Leader of the Reform Party, who finds it harder to get a hearing, turns up the volume and calls Wragg “the greatest hypocrite so far in the 21st century”.
Rishi Sunak meanwhile strives at all costs to avoid what his predecessor, Arthur Balfour, Prime Minister from 1902-05, called “the unforgiveable sin” of splitting the Conservative Party, as Peel split it in 1846.
But by attempting, on the profoundly divisive issue of Tariff Reform, to please everyone, Balfour ended up pleasing no one, and contributed to the Liberal landslide of 1906, in which the Conservatives were reduced to only 156 MPs, with Balfour himself losing his seat of Manchester East.
It was a tribute to Balfour’s resilience, and a mark of the respect in which he was held, that he nevertheless carried on as Conservative Leader, and was soon found another seat.
How wonderful it would be, at least to those few of us who continue to profess our admiration for him, if Sunak, despite leading the Conservative Party to electoral disaster, were able to carry on as leader.
But in 1906, while the victorious Liberals took 48.9 per cent of the vote, and 397 seats, the defeated Conservatives, though losing 246 of their previous 402 MPs, still gained 43.4 per cent of the vote.
There is no prospect of the Conservatives under Sunak, or indeed under anyone else, getting 43.4 per cent of the vote at the next general election.
At the most recent general election, held in December 2019, the Conservatives under Boris Johnson gained 43.6 per cent of the vote, and 365 seats. Johnson won because under the slogan Get Brexit Done, he had managed to reunite the Conservatives and lead them to their best result in terms of seats since 1987.
Checking these figures has reminded me of an elementary point which it is easy to push to the back of one’s mind.
In the European elections held on Thursday 23rd May 2019, Farage triumphed at the head of his new outfit, the Brexit Party, with 30.5 per cent of the vote, while the Conservatives were beaten into fifth place, on a mere 8.8 per cent, their worst ever result in a national contest.
Theresa May admitted the game was up, and on Friday announced, her voice breaking, that she would be standing down as Prime Minister as soon as her party could elect a new leader.
By doing so well, albeit in a European rather than a Westminster election, Farage had shown the Conservatives that they were now in the death zone, from which only Johnson appeared to have any chance of rescuing them.
When I remarked not long afterwards to a senior member of the 1922 Committee that Johnson had been careful to avoid getting blood on his hands by assassinating May himself, and had left it to the ’22 to wield the dagger, the senior member replied with a smile: “Oh no, we thought it safer to leave it to Nigel Farage.”
History never repeats itself word for word. There are always differences, and one should beware of pushing any analogy too far.
But the possibility now exists that it will be Farage who finishes off Sunak. For although Britain will not be participating in the forthcoming European elections, which will be held on 6th-9th June, in a recent YouGov poll Reform, though at present led by Tice rather than Farage, is on 16 per cent, with the Conservatives on 21 per cent and Labour on 40.
It is evident from these polling figures that the Right is split, with electoral disaster beckoning for the Conservatives, of which the local elections on 2nd May may give a foretaste, though in those Reform is putting up very few candidates compared to either the Conservatives or Labour.
Farage is an insurgent of genius, with whom the progressive Establishment has never known how to cope, for he attacks it from the Right, on which they have erected no defences, because from that direction they do not expect to be attacked.
Here is a campaigner with old-fashioned clothes and old-fashioned recreations who emerges from the saloon bar with a perfect ability to voice the discontents of the man in the pub, the exasperation felt by millions of quiet, law-abiding citizens who do not want to be modernised against their will and can sometimes be found watching GB News.
Sunak has many fine qualities, but lacks the impudent brio needed to express the conservative instincts of the working class: love of country, symbolised above all by the monarchy and the armed forces; contempt for high-minded liberals who claim to be the friends of the poor but in fact know nothing about them; respect for family, hard work, cussedness, cheerfulness and saying what the hell you like, especially if it shocks the liberals.
Nor did Jeremy Hunt, runner up in the Conservative leadership contest in the summer of 2019, possess the qualities needed to take on Farage. Johnson, the victor, certainly did, as we saw in the general election at the end of 2019, when the Brexit Party was forced to stand down in Conservative-held seats and ended up with a mere two per cent of the vote.
Farage’s great weakness is that he cannot work with other people. He is a one-man band: all that geniality hides a loner. If he were to sideline Tice and take over Reform, the immediate effect would probably be to swell that party’s support, but before long the balloon would burst, just as it did at the end of 2019.
This is no immediate comfort to Sunak, but it should be some comfort to Conservatives capable of looking beyond the next few months. Tory Democracy, about which I wrote at slightly greater length in my recent book about Johnson, has triumphed for much of our history since Benjamin Disraeli, and there is no reason why it should not triumph again.
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Author: Andrew Gimson
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