Back in 1997, the former minister and famous political diarist Alan Clark identified a potentially fatal flaw in the Conservative party’s leadership system. No, not the controversial membership vote – William Hague did not introduce that until 1998. For Clark, eloquent reactionary that he was, the problem was giving MPs the vote and formal mechanisms to challenge the leader when the old “magic circle” was abolished in the 1960s.
The problem, as Clark saw it, was that it would turn the question of the leadership into a pageant without end. The press would always be able to speculate about a contest, and MPs looking to puff themselves up would have an easy way to do so. Over time, the party’s old norms of internal discipline would, said Clark, be worn away.
A quarter of a century on, events lend credence to his depressing thesis. It was once said of the Conservative party that loyalty was its secret weapon; nobody says that today. In the 1990s, Clark could write of the foolishness of leadership hopefuls who missed their chance, waiting for a better shot at a job that had only fallen vacant a handful of times since the second world war; as it stands, David Cameron was the last Tory leader to remain in post for an entire parliament.
There is surely no disputing that the Conservative party has become a highly unstable institution, and few institutions benefit from being unstable. But there is a compelling counter-argument: which of the recently deposed Tory leaders did not deserve to go?
Boris Johnson fell because he could not command enough support from his MPs to staff a government; Theresa May because she could not steer the government through Brexit; Liz Truss because she tanked the party’s economic reputation (and its polling).
Whatever you think about Partygate, or Brexit, or the mini-budget, in each case the leader was failing at their most essential function: delivering victory for, or failing that securing the survival of, the Conservative and Unionist party.
This is the context in which the current, increasingly feverish speculation about Kemi Badenoch’s leadership is taking place. Her supporters can fairly claim that the Tories have made a vice of leadership contests, and that their woman has not yet been in the job a year. Her critics can, equally fairly, make the case that she is failing at the most basic job of any Conservative leader: survival.
Last month’s local elections were a shattering rout. Overall, the party lost two-thirds of the seats it was defending; in several counties, it went from near-hegemonic control to single-digit shares of the vote. That has shaken complacent MPs out of the notion that if they held on in 2024, they had a “safe seat”; many have also just lost the councillors who formed the core of their local activist base.
Were next year’s elections to play out the same way, the Conservative machine would be disembowelled across another broad swath of England. Worse still, it could suffer humiliating reversals in Edinburgh and Cardiff. Across much of mainland Britain, the Tories would suddenly be in a potentially fatal position: no longer being the most plausible rightwing option on the ballot paper.
Badenoch’s allies insist that she needs time to turn the ship around. That was always an argument with a clock on it, but it has been worn thinner still by the brutal fact that the Conservatives have actually started going backwards. In May, the party actually under-polled last year’s (already catastrophic) general election performance.
The polls also tell their own story. Prior to the conclusion of the leadership contest in November, the Tories’ share was rising as Labour’s fell. Almost immediately afterwards, its polling went into a nosedive – with Reform UK the main beneficiary.
Fairly or unfairly, the balance of opinion inside the party seems to be not whether there will be a challenge to Badenoch’s leadership, but when.
The most obvious opening is in November, when she marks her first anniversary as leader: the point at which the party’s rules stop protecting a new leader from being challenged. The window of maximum danger runs from then until next May’s local elections and their aftermath; if she survives that, it’s harder to imagine MPs finding the will to depose her later.
But the Conservative party’s internal rules are much more flexible than Labour’s. That one-year immunity from challenge? It’s just a rule of the 1922 Committee of backbench Tory MPs, and they can change it. If the parliamentary party gets its heart set on removing a leader, it can.
With such a shrunken parliamentary party, the threshold of letters to the 1922 chairman needed to trigger a contest is lower than it was in the comparative salad days of the last parliament. Yet both wings of the party took heavy punishment at the general election, and the current balance of the parliamentary party favours neither.
Badenoch won last November by consolidating her own supporters with the anti-Robert Jenrick vote. The key question is whether that second group will decide to move, either because of a plausible challenge from one of their own (James Cleverly 2.0?), or because Jenrick starts to look like the lesser of two evils – a possibility Badenoch increases every time she inches towards his positions on issues such as the European convention on human rights.
Whether a new leader will save the party is another question entirely. The Tory party was once described as an absolute monarchy moderated by regicide; today, it increasingly resembles a state of absolute regicide.
Henry Hill is deputy editor of ConservativeHome
