Conservative party: losing the plot

http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2013/feb/01/editorial-conservative-party-losing-the-plot

Version 0 of 1.

Is the Tory party going crazy? It has increasingly looked this week as if the answer may be Yes. First there was the plot, revealed last Sunday, for the Windsor MP Adam Afriyie to challenge David Cameron if he fails to win an outright majority in 2015. Then, two days ago, senior Tories confirmed to our chief political correspondent that Mr Cameron genuinely faces a confidence vote among MPs by summer 2014 if Tory poll ratings do not improve and if the party gets a drubbing in the local and European elections. Finally, the Daily Mail reported on Friday that the plotters now have George Osborne in their sights as well as Mr Cameron, threatening to try to remove the chancellor if the UK slips into a triple-dip recession this spring.

The first thing to say about these stories is that they should not be dismissed. True, the smoke-to-fire ratio may be fairly high in some of these reports, but there is never any of the former without at least some of the latter. Exaggeration and naivety may be woven into the tales of backbench plots, but there is undoubtedly something substantive going on here. The plots are not figments of reporters' or MPs' imaginations. They exist. To some extent it is ever thus on the backbenches. All leaders are there to be toppled eventually. All parties have to expect their members to plot for power – and the Conservatives are not alone in having to deal with such problems.

But there is a very particular Conservative quality to these plots. Mr Cameron is a strange mix: a politician who is more jumpy about plots than he lets on, but also one who pays relatively little attention to the backbenchers who may threaten him. He is not a Commons tearoom premier, and he is often accused of being aloof (as prime ministers must often be). This allows disaffection to fester. In Mr Cameron's case it takes at least three, sometimes overlapping, forms: first, from the slighted, who resent not getting government jobs; second, from the unclubbable, who feel excluded from the Cameron set and Cameron project; and, finally, from the unreconciled, who never wanted either Mr Cameron or the coalition, which they still regard as a mark of shame, and who are convinced that the essential problem is that the government is not rightwing enough.

This last group appears to be at the heart of the current excitements. In almost every way, however, they have got things wrong. The Tories are not in government in spite of Mr Cameron but, very largely, because of him. It is not Mr Cameron whom the public is wary of, but the Tory party. The generally modest record of the party in the opinion polls in the modern era – and its enduring inability to recapture support in northern cities, Scotland and parts of Wales – is a reminder that the detoxification under Mr Cameron has stalled. The public has little appetite for a more rightwing agenda, either. They do not want more cuts, more privatisation, lower taxes and the rest of the Tory right's prescriptions, and they do not think a more anti-EU stance makes the Tories more attractive. The plotters against Mr Cameron are deluding themselves if they believe that the public might embrace a new leader, especially the kind of leader whom the plotters presumably crave. They should remember their recent history and learn from it. As for Mr Afriyie, he might be well advised to look for another job, because hubris has got the better of him.

The Guardian is no Conservative newspaper, and no supporter of Mr Osborne's austerity economics in particular. But we suspect we have a more objective view of where the Conservative party's interests lie than the plotters do. The Conservative party was a truly national party before it became seduced by Thatcherite economics, Little England bigotries and the desire to scapegoat the poor. But it will never become one again if it follows the plotters' agenda by turning on a leader who, for all his faults, is one of the party's genuine assets with the voters.