After a lot of to and fro, the Conservatives have finally confirmed that they will have a new leader by 2 November. The staggered process will start with candidates being eliminated by the remaining 121 Conservative MPs in September, then leadership hustings for the final four at the autumn conference in Birmingham and finally party members choosing between the last two contenders in an online ballot in October.
Whilst avoiding the mammoth seven-month gap between general election defeat and leadership succession which the party went through in 2005, this timetable is still – at around four months from election loss to its conclusion – significantly longer than in 2001 (3 months) or 1997 (just seven weeks). It is though a few weeks shorter than Labour’s 2010 contest.
Many have said that with the public likely to switch off from the Conservatives for some time to come, a longer process carries little political peril and provides the chance to address the underlying issues around why they lost so badly on 4 July. Get the question right, the theory goes, and the right answer – in terms of who the next Leader should be – is more likely to follow.
Whilst superficially plausible, the chances of this scenario playing out in reality are slight. Just look at the recent general election campaign, where with far more at stake the campaign narrative was driven not by the different visions of the main parties but by the latest batch of polls, high profile gaffes and the personalities of leaders – whether projected through Nigel Farage’s rallies or Ed Davey’s tour of the UK’s leading leisure attractions. Twas ever thus? Maybe. But who says it’s just in the United States that politics is increasingly becoming a branch of the entertainment industry…
The multi-staged nature of the Conservative leadership election gives scope for successive horse races all through the summer and early autumn – something that will be catnip to the media lobby. Who will get nominated, make the final four, perform best at conference to make the last two, and then win the prize (if opposing a government with a working majority of 180 can be classed as such), will fill the political pages for months to come.
All of this will take place amidst the shifting sands of transfers of support, backstabbing and the settling of old scores accumulated during the Party’s long years in power; each providing plenty of silly season fare for journalists hungry for a scoop. Whilst policy will feature, it’s much more likely to be deployed by candidates for the sake of drawing convenient dividing lines with their competitors (such as David Cameron’s pledge to withdraw from the EPP in 2005), rather than as something flowing from considered reflection on the Conservative Party’s woes.
However, though many will decry this supposed ‘trivialisation’ as a missed opportunity, is it really something that’s likely to hold the Conservatives back? After all, it can be argued that Labour’s 2024 win was much more to do with the fallout of two crises, COVID-19 and the Ukrainian war, and accompanying Conservative leadership failings, than any great offer or inspiration from Labour. A similar story can be told around the way in which the 2007-8 financial crisis helped the Conservatives return to office in 2010.
Where the actions of opposition parties, as opposed to government failings, were pivotal in these reversals of fortune was in the selection of a Leader of the Opposition who passed the blink test in a way their predecessors didn’t. Voters could picture David Cameron standing outside Number 10 in a way they couldn’t with William Hague, IDS or Michael Howard; ditto with Keir Starmer following the defeated Ed Miliband and Jeremy Corbyn.
All of this demonstrates that in contemporary politics, valence factors centred on the perceived competence of parties and crucially their leaders seemingly matter as much if not more than policy differences. This is particularly so in a media environment which ‘presidential-ises’ political discourse and where the ideological gap between the political parties is narrower now than it was in the Brexit and Corbyn years of the later 2010s.
In this environment, the candidate who best uses the forthcoming leadership campaign to project strength on core valence issues – through the quality of the content produced by their campaign, the visual backdrops to their public events, the endorsements they seek as well as the content of what they say – will likely be best placed to lead the Conservatives in opposition.
However, given the scale of the recent Tory defeat, they will almost certainly need a significant assist from Labour making errors, or from global events beyond the control of any government, in order to make it to Downing Street in 2029. That said, if there is one thing the 2019 and 2024 elections have shown us, is that party loyalty amongst the electorate is at an all time low, so even the largest of majorities can be overturned if governments fail to deliver or events overwhelm them.