It is said that all elections are a contest between a change option and a more-of-the-same option. But the Conservative party’s leadership election – the first time that a prime minister will have been chosen in a contested vote by party members – knocks these categories for six. For this is a contest in which change is a given and more-of-the-same no longer an option. Not only has Britain voted to leave the European Union, a nationally transformative decision that will dominate everything for the new prime minister, but George Osborne quietly also junked the lynchpin of his austerity strategy on Friday too, announcing that politics and the markets have made his plan to reach a budget surplus by 2020 an impossibility.
In reality, of course, neither Britain’s relationship with the EU nor the policy of public sector austerity is wholly dead, though they are both changed. In addition, the politics of the present is always rooted in the politics of the past – and the Conservative government has a highly divisive record since 2010 which cannot just be wished away by David Cameron’s successor. There is no way in which everything that happened before 23 June can be wiped from the national memory as conveniently as the VoteLeave website appears to have been.
Nevertheless, the politics of the coming months and years will be dominated – and rightly so – by the need to survive and if possible prosper in the massively changed landscape to which Britain woke up just over a week ago. Politics has rarely felt as unstable as they have done in the past eight days either, in the Tory and Labour parties alike. Turmoil and the unexpected are daily experiences. The next election year, 2020, seems a lifetime away.
The Tory leadership contest must nevertheless navigate a way though this new and uncertain world, as must the Labour party. Since the contest is the direct outcome of the Brexit vote, Brexit itself is one of the defining issues of the Tory race. While Boris Johnson was a contender, his prospective victory seemed to be in part the natural consequence of the vote. Some still argue, as Michael Gove did on Friday – well he would, wouldn’t he? – that a Brexit Britain requires a Brexit government. Yet while three of the five surviving candidates were leavers, both Theresa May and Stephen Crabb, who were remainers, have made it clear that they are willing to own the result too. If being a leaver was the only criterion for being elected, Mrs May would not stand a chance. Instead, she is currently the bookies’ favourite.
Nevertheless, Mr Gove cast himself not just as a tribune of the leave cause but explicitly as the candidate of change in his launch on Friday. His speech, nearly 5,000 words long, was certainly policy-rich. There were interesting pledges on housing and health and strong words on corporate pay. He came much closer than any of his rivals to implicitly questioning the whole trajectory of globalisation and the austerity and inequality that have come in its wake – the British contract has been broken, he said. Mrs May’s own launch remarks on the same theme seem very tentative by comparison.
Yet both Mrs May and Mr Gove have been pillars of the governments that presided over precisely this process. So, in lesser ways, have all their rivals. This puts fundamental limits on Mr Gove’s credibility as its critic. Undoubtedly there are significant numbers of younger Tory MPs who will like Mr Gove’s liberal thinktank Toryism. But it remains to be seen whether the Tory party in the country is in the mood for Gove-style policy radicalism or whether, even though she did not vote for leave, they prefer the stability and continuity that Mrs May plays to.
There is anecdotal evidence for this. That is hardly surprising, especially in the light of what an earlier generation would have called the character question. Mr Gove’s disloyalty towards both Mr Cameron over the EU and now towards the deeply flawed Mr Johnson on the succession has been so brutal that he may no longer get the benefit of the doubt.
Mrs May may be, as Nick Clegg once said, a somewhat icy politician. But she offers the proverbial safe hands that any party craves when the going is tough. More-of-the-same may not be on the menu, but Mrs May appears to be the candidate around whom the Tories seem willing to unite more than any other. Whether that is enough is a different question. The Tory government has led Britain to a disastrous place internationally and domestically. The next leader will need a lot more than safe hands to steer Britain towards its land of lost content.
