Over the last two weeks, the UK’s so-called “Nasty Party” proved how nasty it could be. There are few things more divisive than a battle for the leadership of the British Conservatives. After all, it turns out that, much as many of their traditionalists do their best to maintain their party’s history of snobbery, chauvinism and xenophobia, there’s nothing a “true blue” Tory hates more than another sort of Tory.
This was demonstrated in the most extraordinarily unedifying and self-destructive fashion when supporters of the right-of-right-wing candidate Foreign Secretary Liz Truss turned their ire against Penny Mordaunt, her main rival for the second spot (alongside former Chancellor Rishi Sunak) in the final pair to be put before a ballot of party members.
Ten days ago, the country’s more right-wing papers launched their hate campaigns against Ms. Mordaunt. Following Mordaunt’s second placing in nominations and in the first two parliamentary ballots, Team Truss had clearly decided it was time to strike back. Boris Johnson’s former Brexit negotiator, the aptly named Lord Frost, told the Daily Telegraph that he considered her a lightweight with scant attention to detail and incapable of the responsibilities of the highest office (a description that might also of course have suited his former boss). The Daily Mail devoted a full ten pages to attacking Ms. Mordaunt as an unserious politician and a “part-time minister”, while singing the praises of its new golden girl, the zealous Ms. Truss.
Former Conservative leader Sir Iain Duncan Smith had meanwhile suggested that Ms. Mordaunt lacked the experience necessary to govern the country. In fact, Penny Mordaunt had served in Theresa May’s Cabinet but not in Boris Johnson’s. Indeed, it was precisely this distance from the top of the Johnson administration which appeared to endear her to ordinary party members. Polling of grassroots Tories had already shown her to be their preferred choice for premier.
The hardline right of the party was of course desperate to prevent two figures it’s seen as centrist liberals – Mordaunt and Sunak – in the final run-off for the keys to Downing Street. Ms. Truss, though having voted in 2016 for the UK to remain in the European Union, is now perceived as being as Eurosceptic, as supportive of wealth, and as tough on immigration and workers’ rights – in short, a new Margaret Thatcher – as the very worst of them.
(The worst of them is, of course, Home Secretary Priti Patel. Ms. Patel chose not to stand for the leadership: it appears that even her most ardent backers realized that her smug, sneering manner and her brazen brand of hardline Conservatism might prove unpalatable to a broader electorate).
Liz Truss doesn’t always come over as the brightest button in the pack, but she displays a clumsy zeal for traditional Tory values and a broad dislike of foreigners which goes down well in the conservative shires. She has all the self-effacing charm of Margaret Thatcher and all the incisive intellectual focus of Boris Johnson – which, if you’re looking for effective political leadership, is of course entirely the wrong way round.
Yet, while many Labour supporters might well relish the thought of the Tories heading into the next election all trussed up, there are real dangers for the country in her brand of hardline gung-ho politics, a combination of Thatcher’s ideological fervor and Johnson’s unthinking bluster. Truss represents the possibility of radical action founded upon blind faith. That’s the last thing one wants in those entrusted with political power.
The contest entered the second half of this month with the prospect of a trio of televised debates between the surviving candidates. The first debate saw Liz Truss appear, in the words of the Daily Express, “nervous and often flustered” and displaying none of the rhetorical confidence of her idol, Margaret Thatcher. However, as the Twitterati observed, she appeared to have dressed in a direct homage to Mrs. Thatcher, copying her choice of dress for a 1979 election broadcast. Yet what Ms. Truss failed to understand is that you can’t copy Thatcher: The Iron Lady, for all her controversies and faults, was an absolute original. She didn’t copy anyone; to try to copy her is to miss the point of what it was to be her.
The Sun newspaper supposed that Truss’s fiscal plans had been “torn apart” in that first debate by Rishi Sunak, who, The Times said, had “gone on the offensive” in his “plea for honesty” in the face of what he had described as his fellow candidates’ “fairy-tale” promises of “unfunded spending sprees”. As the BBC supposed, this had felt less like “a friendly debate between colleagues in the same party” than a “fight for the future” of British Conservativism.
Penny Mordaunt’s backers argued that she had tried, as the BBC reported, to “rise above the squabbling”. She had done her best to stay above the rancorous fray, but she had as a result failed to capitalize upon the momentum of her campaign to deal her closest rival any kind of a deadly blow.
Her party appreciates a certain degree of ruthless strength, and many would have felt she squandered the opportunity to demonstrate the politician’s essential killer instinct. She had looked simultaneously woke and wishy-washy, apologetic for her own relatively progressive positions.
She had called the attacks on her in the press a “big fat compliment’“– suggesting that her hardline rivals considered her their greatest threat. But, by playing it safe in the first debate, her lackluster performance made little impact on the following morning’s headlines.
She had featured prominently only in the Daily Telegraph, which led with condescendingly sympathetic coverage of an exclusive interview in which she had complained of the “black ops” campaign launched against her by her rivals and had insisted she was nevertheless “up to the job”. This looked a bit like self-pleading and self-pity, the last things wanted by a party hardly known for its shows of sympathy or mercy. She had perhaps been unwise to open her heart to a paper which would prefer to see a much tougher Tory in power.
That same day, amidst inflamed political tensions, and a few days after business leaders had asked the leadership candidates not to turn their backs on strategies to address the threats of climate change, the UK Health Security Agency declared a national emergency, when the British Meteorological Office issued its first ever “red extreme heat warning”. This did not bode well for a cooling of the passionate antagonisms at the heart of the Conservative Party.
The battle for Tory supremacy was described that weekend by The Observer newspaper as “squalid and parochial“, the “unedifying” spectacle of a “hollow shell” of a political party struggling to maintain its relevance – represented by what the Sunday Times called a “weak field” of candidates, reflecting a “government exhausted after twelve years in power” – an administration that had lost its way.
On the day of the second TV debate, Penny Mordaunt complained to the BBC that she was the victim of a campaign of “smears” coordinated by a “toxic” brand of politics. Again, she was beginning to sound like a bit of what her patrician peers might consider a snowflake” or a “whingeing ninny”. The lady was perhaps protesting too much.
That second debate went on to retread the same old ground: tax cuts, Brexit, loyalty to Boris Johnson (or otherwise) and the question (intended to sideline her) as to whether Mordaunt had ever supported transgendered people’s rights.
It was dominated by what the BBC’s political editor described as the “stark animosity” between Rishi Sunak and Liz Truss, the former finding himself characterized by the latter as being presentationally “slick”, the latter critiqued by the former for being economically unreliable. Each tried to undermine the public trust in the other. The tension between “Dim Lizzie” and “Dishy Rishi” was palpable, but not in a good way. This was hardly the final reel of a Hollywood rom-com.
This clash between these two senior figures from the Johnson administration was portrayed by one Truss supporter as the “battle of the grown-ups”. It had also been, as another BBC correspondent observed, “a brutal and bloody battle”. In the meantime, however, in the heat of this struggle, Penny Mordaunt had failed once more to seize the initiative or to make much mark upon the debate at all.
The following morning, the Daily Express announced that there was “no chance” that her rivals would heed Ms. Mordaunt’s pleas for restraint amidst these “brutal exchanges” and “smears“. At the same time, those attacks on Penny Mordaunt continued on the front page of the Daily Mail, which reported that she had been condemned for her “dodgy judgment”, after it had been revealed that last year she had met with a Muslim group boycotted by Boris Johnson’s government.
That day, in an extraordinary development, the third and final scheduled TV debate was cancelled when both Sunak and Truss withdrew from the broadcast, amidst Tory concerns as to the damage that these increasingly open shows of spite were inflicting upon the public perception of their party.
Indeed, that very morning, a former Cabinet minister had written in The Times newspaper that the campaign had become overwhelmed by “allegations of dark arts and dirty tricks”. There was a real anxiety that any further escalation of hostilities might see the party, and its future electoral hopes, irrevocably implode.
That evening – a week ago, two days before the conclusion of the parliamentary process – the results of the third round of MPs’ votes continued to show Mr. Sunak in the lead, with Ms. Mordaunt having lost much ground to Ms. Truss, but still maintaining her second place, albeit with one vote less than in the previous round. (As expected, Tom Tugendhat, an arch critic of Boris Johnson, was out.)
That Monday night was reported as the UK’s hottest on record. It certainly had been so in Westminster. Tuesday was even worse. Temperatures topped 40 degrees Celsius for the first time since records began, and wildfires raged across the land.
It seemed clear at that point that the hardline right campaign against Penny Mordaunt was reaping its rewards. On Tuesday morning, the Daily Mail triumphantly crowed that her campaign had “hit the buffers” and “dramatically stalled”. Its fellow Tory tabloid the Daily Express similarly declared that Liz Truss’s bid was “gaining momentum” while quoting that stalwart of the hardline right, former Tory leader (and Truss supporter) Iain Duncan Smith’s view that Ms. Mordaunt’s had “stalled”.
That day, amidst the infernal heat and flames that had engulfed the nation, the fourth ballot removed the little-known Kemi Badenoch, and left Sunak, Mordaunt and Truss in the race. Though Mordaunt had gained 10 votes, Truss had gained 15 to further narrow the gap for second place. Again, the right-wing press had worked its dark magic. Ideologically closest to Liz Truss, Ms. Badenoch had scored 59 votes. Their redistribution would prove crucial in the final ballot of the Parliamentary Conservative Party, which took place last Wednesday.
Wednesday morning inevitably saw the Mail boast of Truss’s surge and the Express laud the “surging Truss”. (If you think that might sound like an unpleasant medical condition, you wouldn’t be far wrong.) The front pages of most of the other papers focused on the fact that much of the country had been on fire the previous day. For some at least, the Tory leadership race wasn’t the most burning issue of the hour.
Shortly before the announcement of the outcome of Wednesday’s vote, one of Ms. Mordaunt’s key supporters conceded that the barrage of nasty personal attacks had scuppered his candidate’s chances of making it onto the ballot paper that will be set before the party as a whole – though it seemed clear that she could well have prevailed if she had made it that far.
In the end then, the Nasty Party got its nasty candidate, in the form of Liz Truss. Some would say it got what it deserved. Yet Wednesday’s result was as much the product of the shady and manipulative practices of the Tory press as of the consciences and conscious choices of Conservative MPs.
So, there we have it: Truss versus Sunak. Ideological, emotional and intellectual opposites, politically distinct, and with very different communication styles – one smart and smooth, the other displaying neither of those qualities – but both the direct offspring of the tainted administration led by the blustering blond buffoon they’d just cast out.
For all his many flaws and peccadilloes, Boris Johnson’s ability to laugh at himself had always been his saving grace in the face of the British public. But, as power had fed and bloated his narcissism and his hubris, that ability had begun to desert him. His self-effacing bonhomie was barely on show when last week he led a parliamentary confidence vote on his own performance, presenting his peers with an almost pathologically self-aggrandizing perspective upon his achievements while in office.
Then, when on Wednesday he’d fielded questions for the last time in parliament, he declared his mission largely accomplished. He had seemed entirely oblivious to the obvious allusion: the mission accomplished” banner in front of which George W. Bush had stood when in May 2003 he had announced American victory in Iraq. (Though perhaps the irony had belatedly had struck him; when leaving the chamber, he’d quoted one of Bush’s more prominent Republican contemporaries, a certain Arnold Schwarzenegger: “Hasta la vista, baby.”)
There seemed something tragically deluded in Mr. Johnson’s desire to congratulate himself in front of the party which had so recently rejected him. The UK is suffering rampant rates of inflation, and nowhere more so than in its outgoing premier’s ego.
If their earnest campaign launches and their uninspiringly dour and self-serving performances in the candidates’ debates are anything to go by, whichever of Mr. Johnson’s former acolytes eventually takes his crown, it looks like the country may be in for rather more of the same.
The fear is, of course, that this unrepresentative and introspective selection process will merely reduce to the point of logical absurdity the legacy of this moribund administration, distilling all its decadence and apathy into a hollow victory for whichever member of this depressingly undynamic duo finally makes it through.
But which one might win? If I were a betting man (which I’m not), I’d stake my money on… well, actually on both of them. Sunak has the cerebral appeal; his opponent has a visceral claim upon the Tories’ hearts – no, not their hearts, their guts – their bile.
To back both runners might be mathematically naïve, but it seems at the same time morally apt. In contests like this, only the bookmakers win. Everyone else – all the rest of the country – look set to lose.
A few days ago, I was sent a meme that showed Miss Piggy, Kermit, Fozzie and their friends waiting on the doorstep of 10 Downing Street, waiting to move in. Frankly, they couldn’t be much worse than whichever bunch of Muppets will eventually get the keys.
*The writer is a journalist, author and academic.
July 28, 2022
*The viewpoints expressed by the authors do not necessarily reflect the opinions, viewpoints and editorial policies of Aequitas Review.
