Rumours are apparently circulating among some Conservative MPs of an early leadership challenge if/when Liz Truss is in power at no.10.
Many regret voting against Boris and would like a re vote.
Hmmm, reminiscent of the Brexit debacle….
Maybe they should have selected someone else for the final run off then, just a thought.
1 Like
I would guess principally the so called red wall ones who are likely to lose their seats at the next GE without an effective liar at the helm 
1 Like
Not just a liar - Truss seems to be shaping up well in that department but a charismatic liar who can persuade the country that five more years of Tory rule will somehow be different to the fourteen years that went beforehand (assuming a 2024 GE).
I think they are discovering the uncomfortable truth that, terrible as Johnson was, there isn’t actually anyone better.
Someone like Hunt, maybe one or two more (Patterson?, Tugendhat??, Wallace???) would be significantly more competent but would never satisfy the ERG zealots - in any case, Hunt has twice been rejected by the party so I think his leadership ambitions are now thoroughly thwarted.
The cabinet is in “box of frogs” territory, it’s difficult to believe but the party can offer plenty of candidates who would be significantly worse than Truss - off the top of my head I’d suggest that Raab, Patel, Kwarteng, Coffey, Cleverley, Shapps, Eustace, Braverman, Rees-Mogg, Grayling, Dorries and probably Zahawi would be much, much worse
The other hopefuls - Mordaunt, Badenoch and Javid would have been worse, Sunak will also be worse if he wins but there seems scant likelyhood of that. Thankfully the likes of Fabricant, Swayne, Francois, Bridgen, Cash, Redwood, Davis or IDS don’t have any leadership ambitions - because any of those would be much, much, much, much, much, much worse.
Most of the rest either don’t have any ambition to lead the party or are too inexperienced.
Gove is a wild card - he isn’t showing any ambition at the moment, there has been speculation he wants no part at the moment so as to have clean hands later - but there has also been speculation that he wants to leave politics.
This weeks blog by Chris Grey neatly outlines why the party are in such a mess at the moment - worth a read.
1 Like
Reading Chris Grey this week I found myself thinking about the last time the Tory party split badly - over the Corn Laws. In retrospect, we can see this as driven not by a ‘battle of ideas’ but by the divergence of underlying economic interests (landowners wanted to keep agricultural prices high to maximise rents; business-owners wanted them low so they could pay lower wages - an aspect of a broad realignment of classes).
(The recurring limitation of Grey’s commentary is of course his centrist tendency to focus on ideology and psychology, rather than the economics that really drive politics.)
Is there actually a similar split in ‘the establishment’ now? I think there may well be.
It’s pretty clear what the faction now leading the Tory party thinks of ‘business’. Will Hutton recently pointed out that entrepreneurs are indeed now not the macho bastard accountants of right-wing mythology, but socially-conscious experts - university spin-outs, green technologists, ‘kitchen-table’ women entrepreneurs, etc. Even some mutinationals like Danone here in France are consciously focusing on social and environmental responsibility over profit. And it goes further: social echelons that would previously have been firmly in the Tory camp - senior people in the professions, for example - are being moved left simply by evidence and logic: climate/ecological breakdown can’t be mitigated via capitalist mechanisms.
So where is the economic alignment of the currently leading Tory faction? That’s easy - ‘investors’ interested primarily not in enterprise but in assets: hedge funds, private equity firms and property developers - precisely those that now in fact fund the Tory party. Not people that actually start and run businesses, but the modern equivalents of landowners. Is it the old split come again?
2 Likes
= 'rentiers"
A term that is becoming pejorative in English, although I believe still pretty much neutral in French
That wouldn’t create enough chaos, allowing the providential Raab or whoever to come swooping in. Disgusting. It’s amazing they are so good at filling their pockets seeing their hands are busy with the knives for backstabbing. UGH. Speculators and carpetbaggers.
They really are a cynical pile of steaming turds.
1 Like
All the decent ones were thrown out by Boris.
1 Like
…gracing the rivers and beaches
1 Like
Certainly those who would not sign up to his verion of Brexit.
Careful - you’ll give cynical piles of steaming turds a bad name.
4 Likes
Does the surprise election result in Alaska have any relevance to a possible UK Tory Party split?
Maybe. Here’s what happened…
In the first round there were Democrat and two Republican candidates (Sarah Palin, endorsed by Trump, and a more moderate Republican). Together the Republicans got 60% of the vote - unsurprising, since Alaska has always been very right-wing Republican.
However, with a voting system like France’s, the third placed candidate - the moderate Republican - was eliminated - then came the surprise. When the second preferences of the eliminated Republican were counted, the Democrat gained more than half of the votes.
So moderate Republicans, forced to choose between a Democrat and an extreme right Republican, chose the Democrat.