Certain people become terribly animated as to whether MPs or members should chose Party Leaders, but the truth is that they are both rubbish. Leaders chosen by either the MPs or the members are generally bad enough. Yet the Conservatives look set to join Labour in having one who had been chosen by both. Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear.
Conservative MPs chose John Major, William Hague, Michael Howard, Theresa May and Rishi Sunak, while the party members presented a grateful nation with Iain Duncan Smith, David Cameron, Boris Johnson and Liz Truss. Take your pick. It was considered that Howard, May and Sunak were self-evidently the only candidates, meaning that May and Sunak were appointed directly to the Premiership without a vote's having been cast even among MPs, although the MPs had been heavily behind both. In and out of Parliament, any doubters were dismissed as obvious lunatics.
Labour pulled the same trick with Gordon Brown, although he would also have won a members' ballot. But in 2020, the Parliamentary Labour Party had been all ready to secede, and to litigate for the party's assets, if the plebs had not given it who it wanted, as they duly did. The 100-year blackout of the Left had been reimposed, so the only noises off that anyone would admit to being able to hear were from sniffy old Blairites. Those can hardly complain today, though. Beyond their wildest dreams is the means-testing of Brown's winter fuel payment, a key measure in cementing the enormous popularity that he enjoyed for many years, long after most voters had recognised that the Blairites' own hero was a war criminal surrounded by crooks.
Well, now we have another Prime Minister who is a war criminal surrounded by crooks, and who is arguably a crook himself. When he is not starving children, then he is freezing pensioners. The MPs and the party members both chose him, although at the present rate the MPs will soon be the only remaining members of the Labour Party. So again, and even before considering that Labour's rules had been changed under Keir Starmer to make a contested Leadership Election effectively impossible, when it came to whether MPs or members should choose the Leader, then take your pick.
The electoral success of Reform UK, taking 15% of the vote and coming second in 100 seats, meant it was always going to be two candidates from the Tory Right in the final two for the leadership. As the BBC notes "Badenoch has become the darling of the Conservative Right for her opposition to trans rights."
ReplyDeleteHer and Jenrick are similarly sound on this issue, and on political correctness and illegal immigration (although he is right to say we also need to leave the ECHR).
It will be a close call.
If all five Reform MPs were both still in the House of Commons and still in the same party by the end of this Parliament, then the British Establishment would have lost its touch. And the British Establishment will never lose its touch.
DeleteThe Liberal Democrats are doing victory laps over this, and from their own point of view, they are right.
He's a crook and she hacked Harriet Harman's website.
ReplyDeleteJenrick is even a cheap date among corrupt politicians, approving a planning application worth one billion pounds for a donation of only £12,000.
DeleteThe last Tory leader chosen by the party membership against the wishes of its MPs going into an election won the Red Wall and an 80-seat majority. Nobody cares what the Lib Dems think as they are not a nationally (as opposed to locally) popular party. But the Tories are right to realise that only a candidate from the Right who opposes immigration and political correctness can appeal to those Red Wall seats they won when they last had a leader backed by the Right promising a Hard Brexit in 2019.
ReplyDeleteStarmer's majority is bigger than Johnson's was, and is Starmer any good? Local popularity is often all that you need under First Past the Post, under which you always need some of it. Thus, 72 seats versus five. Five is the same number as the Independent Alliance. Reform UK matters only as much as that does.
DeleteStarmer's majority is bigger than Johnson's was, and is Starmer any good?
ReplyDeleteThat’s because of constituency boundaries (Johnson got far more votes than Starmer). But my point was the members obviously have a far better feel for the national pulse than MPs: if the MPs had had their way the Tory leader in 2019 would have been Jeremy Hunt and I can tell you there’d have been no 80-seat majority or Red Wall switch to the Tories then. And we all know Kemi Badenoch would be far more popular with the electorate (not least because she actually believes in things and speaks her mind) than some “centrist” robot like Cleverly.
There would have been no 2019 Election under Hunt. Off whom never take your eye.
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