Tag: membership

Oliver and Rishi, down by the pool

In a fancy garden near here, the strange drama of the Conservative leadership contest approaches its climax

Last week, Rishi Sunak, currently trailing Liz Truss by 26 points in the contest that will produce a new leader of the Conservative Party (and, because of a mediaeval malfunction in the Parliamentary machinery, a Prime Minister too) was invited to visit the home of a wealthy Hertfordshire Conservative Councillor to speak to local party members.

Like a lot of what we’ve seen from around the country during the Tory leadership contest, the result is a kind of grim social comedy and very close to self-parody. The 100-odd Conservative members apparently present are out of shot. Artfully in shot is a sparkling swimming pool and, above it, a grand suburban villa.

How to discuss a scene like this, at a time when, according to one of the big energy companies, 50% of UK households are about to fall into fuel poverty? Absolutely no idea.

But it’s worth watching the video closely. It has a kind of anthropological value. We’re deep in the heartland of the Home Counties Tory elite here. On Sunak’s side of the pool, milling around, there’s a group of comfortable-looking Tory alpha males, including local grandees who’ve already secured a clutch of gongs and are thus in the home straight for a peerage whoever wins (you’ll have read about some of these guys in Private Eye’s Rotten Boroughs column). There’s at least one of those white straw hats you see at cricket matches.

In this suburban garden we see a snapshot of the context for everything promised by the two candidates in the last couple of months. All the dog whistles about lazy workers, ‘our women‘, tax cuts, grammar schools, deporting refugees and so on are for this powerful audience of ultra-Tory comedy caricatures and not for the wider British electorate. At a more recent hustings, for instance, we learn that frontrunner – and serving Foreign Secretary – Liz Truss is happy to toss Britain’s historic alliance with our nearest continental neighbour into the wood-chipper to win their votes.

That’s not to say we shouldn’t expect some genuinely loopy policies once the winner is in place, of course, but what emerges in the Autumn will certainly bear little resemblance to what we’ve seen during the contest.

Anyway, back in the garden, the candidate is introduced by our own MP Oliver Dowden – also in line for a peerage, of course, for his service to a sequence of PMs – although we suspect he’s got a few more years in the trenches before he’s sent up (and perhaps some time in the wilderness of the back benches too, given his lamentable judgement in backing Sunak over Truss). Dowden says: “Rishi’s got the skills, he’s got the energy, he’s got the vision to fire up our economy and on to a brighter future…”

Sunak opens by connecting his own story to the aspirations of his audience:

And just as our country did something wonderful for my family I want to do the same for everyone, for your children and grandchildren and make sure they have the same fantastic opportunities too.

He has a three-part prescription:

But how are we going to do that? Well, we need to do three things. We need to restore trust, we need to rebuild the economy and we need to reunite our country.

Remember, there’s a week more of this stuff before the polls close and another few days before the results are in and we begin to see how our new Prime Minister responds to the building poly-crisis of energy prices, the highest inflation (and slowest growth) in the G7, a tough season of industrial action and a long recession.

Since this short video was made Sunak and Truss have surely both stood in front of at least half a dozen other sparkling pools. Any sign of the candidates getting together to plan a response to the Winter energy crisis yet? No. Just the Chancellor advising pensioners to turn the thermostat down a bit.

Thanks to the nice people at My Radlett News for the video, which is on their YouTube channel.

Whither Dowden?

Our MP was way out in front with his resignation from the Johnson government and may have been plotting against the PM for a while

It seems like a long time ago but it’s actually only a month since Oliver Dowden, MP for Hertsmere, resigned as Conservative Party Co-Chairman. And you’d be forgiven for forgetting that it wasn’t actually Pinchergate – the most recent crisis of Boris Johnson’s leadership – that induced his departure; it was the previous one – the catastrophic 23 June double byelection loss in Wakefield and Tiverton and Honiton.

Dowden’s resignation letter was a shock at the time and seemed out of character for such a loyal soldier: a short and blunt critique of the Prime Minister, out of the blue – “We cannot carry on with business as usual. Somebody must take responsibility…” A few weeks on it seems like a relatively mild intervention and, of course, it was only a preview of a flood of over 60 letters, sent by ministers and advisers and PPSs, in the three days between 5 and 7 July, once Johnson had provided the final push by trying to defend his terrible friend Pincher.

And we’ve all already forgotten the gossip that Dowden had been plotting with his old boss David Cameron (in an ‘elite Mayfair club’ natch) to ‘destabilise’ Boris Johnson after the catastrophic May local elections.

The flurry of letters – the largest number of resignations submitted in a single day in party history – was a hyper-modern, social media affair. Almost all of them were published exclusively on Twitter – and there was some entertainment. Some were unreadable, some weren’t even letters, just hurried tweets or Facebook posts (we do wonder who archives all this official correspondence). Some were written up by local reporters. Some came very very soon after their senders had replaced resigning ministers (Michelle Donelan was Education Minister for 35 hours and has promised to return her Ministerial redundancy money). Liam Fox managed to resign even though he hasn’t been a minister for years and recently appointed Chancellor Nadhim Zahawi hedged his bets by carefully sending a strongly-worded letter addressed to no one that wasn’t actually a resignation (and he’s consequently still in his job).

Meanwhile, Dowden came out for Rishi Sunak on 8 July, right at the beginning of the process, sharing the boilerplate social media endorsement given to him by Rishi’s team.

Oliver Dowden's social media endorsement of Rishi Sunak. The text reads: "Rishi is the best person to lead our country and unquestionably the best person to beat Labour. That's why I'm backing him to be our next Prime Minister. Ready for Rishi
Oliver Dowden’s social media endorsement of Rishi Sunak

Dowden’s support for Sunak is not surprising. The former Chancellor seems to be the closest of the two surviving leadership candidates to the outlook of the pre-Johnson, pre-populist, pre-chaos administration of Theresa May – the panicky interregnum in which Sunak first saw office – and to the seemingly unending nightmare of the Cameron years in which Dowden did. Our MP’s journey – from Cameroonian moderniser to Johnsonite Culture Wars enforcer always seemed an uncomfortable one. Perhaps in supporting Sunak he is rejoining the Tory mainstream.