Britain has had more than its fair share of elections over the past few years. But the next one will be markedly different to all the others: for the first time in nearly 30 years, it will see a Tory party that isn’t sure if it wants to win this fight.
The party is manifestly exhausted and out of ideas, with even ministers saying privately that a spell in opposition wouldn’t be the worst thing. Rishi Sunak is of course determined to do everything he can to win against a Labour Party with a large but soft poll lead. But he has long privately worried that his party won’t be marching obediently behind him as he tries to do battle.
Take this past week in politics. It was supposed to be “stop the boats” week, with carefully-planned Government announcements on tackling illegal immigration in for each day. In the event, it turned into Lee Anderson week, with the outspoken Tory MP and TV presenter having an even more detailed media grid than Downing Street: not a day went by without a memorable quote from Anderson.
He told migrants who didn’t like the Bibby Stockholm barge to “f**k off back to France”, claimed the Government had “failed” to stop the boats, and said he was “very angry” that Channel crossings in small boats have now passed the 100,000 mark.
In normal times, this would be the sort of behaviour you’d expect from a backbench member of the Awkward Squad, but Anderson is in fact Tory deputy chair. Not only does he have a job, that job is ostensibly about sharpening up the Conservative campaign and making them a winning outfit.
Some Conservatives argue that Anderson is given licence to make all this noise because it actually helps their party in “Red Wall” seats to have someone blunt and outspoken showing they understand voters’ frustration. “They brought Lee in to stop him pissing into the tent on immigration,” says one minister. “But they’ve realised that having him pissing out of it helps us too as otherwise it’s just a bunch of London types in our campaign operation.”
Adopting a pissing out of the tent strategy is of course a very messy approach to an election. As much as it shows “Red Wall” voters someone in the party hears them, it also makes the party seem noisy, ill-disciplined and as though it can’t make its mind up. Is having one of your own campaign chiefs saying you’ve “failed” really a cunning plan?
Either way, it’s all Sunak and his colleagues have got, because Anderson isn’t the only person awkwardly campaigning their way to the election. Cabinet ministers have also been pushing for big policy promises such as quitting the European Convention on Human Rights at a stage in the electoral cycle when parties normally hunker down and start parroting the same slogan.
“Long-term economic plan”, “Get Brexit done”: the voters knew what the Conservatives stood for in 2015 and 2019 because they had forgotten how to talk about anything else. Even Boris Johnson, who traded on appearing unruly, was incredibly disciplined in the 2019 campaign – in part because his aides and wife Carrie took back control of the Prime Minister to prevent him from committing any gaffes. He had booted out Tories who disagreed with him on Brexit, and campaign chiefs would go “bonkers” at any minor deviation from the script from junior ministers. Sunak doesn’t have the authority in his party to demand this, and not enough of his MPs care to do it themselves.
The party campaign operation is also depressed and thin: this week chairman Greg Hands launched a review of the London operation after a disastrous selection process for the mayoral contest – and a result in Uxbridge and South Ruislip that had far more to do with Sadiq Khan’s Ulez expansion than it did the genius of CCHQ.
MPs who campaigned for the Tories in Uxbridge came back reporting a “disorganised” campaign with leaflets that didn’t make any sense. They also felt the results in the other by-elections on the same day, in which the Tories lost both Selby and Ainsty and Somerton and Frome, better foreshadowed the “carnage” they will face at the general election.
Hands is a marked man in the party at the moment, with plenty of colleagues muttering darkly about him. He is also someone who will not cope well with an unruly election campaign. “Greg’s a party man,” says one long-time colleague. “He is actually way more tribal about the Tories than most Labour people are about their party which is something. He loves the machine.”
Unlike Anderson, who previously worked for the Labour MPs whose old constituency he now represents, Hands can’t really imagine not following the party line. When he was chief whip, he found it impossible not to get involved in seemingly small instances where MPs seemed to be briefing journalists vaguely inconvenient information, at one stage sending some of them a message that they shouldn’t talk to me (amusingly, one of them immediately passed the message onto me) about a very banal story. His banal dictatorship method is irreconcilable with an election campaign where MPs are just left to say whatever they think will get them over the line in their area.
Hands is responsible for party campaign machinery, not strategy. But Tory MPs are also not happy about the way things are going on the latter, either, complaining that election guru Isaac Levido isn’t as present as they would expect at this stage – he’s only visible about once a week – and that he’s not even keen to appear signed up to the five key pledges that Sunak wearily promises he is doing everything to try to meet, even as the evidence mounts that he can’t.
At this stage in previous long campaigns, figures such as Lynton Crosby were so intimately involved and controlling that everyone knew exactly what they needed to be doing: even quite willing Tory MPs say they’re largely being left to it.
Sunak plans a reshuffle soon to get his team in the best pre-election shape. He knows, though, that the rest of his party won’t be up to much even when the election date looms large in their minds. The question is whether he can find a way of looking comfortable, rather than pained, with what will have to be a noisy and confusing election campaign that no leader with more authority would ever have chosen themselves.
Isabel Hardman is assistant editor of The Spectator magazine
When did 'Red Wall voter' become shorthand for bigot?