The Tory leadership contest which has already been going for quite a while reaches a first milestone on 4th September. Tory MPs will vote with the aim of reducing the existing 6 candidates to 4 by the time of the Tory Conference in a few weeks.
All of the candidates have managed to come out with a range of outlandish hard to far right ideas. As a (Tory) Sunday Times journalist (1st Sept) noted the first step to Tory recovery is that they stop being weird. So far that is not happening. The three leadership candidates who sat in Truss’s 49 day Cabinet, Badenoch, Cleverly and Tugendhat have offered no explanation on what they were doing there.
None of the six candidates were in Parliament before 2010 and so have no experience of Opposition. Further public recognition is low with a fake candidate often doing well in polls.
Does it matter? After all Labour has a massive majority. It matters in the sense that Parliamentary democracy requires a credible Opposition which the Tories are not. Of course that opposition could come to an extent from Plaid, the SNP, Greens, Independent Left and the LibDems.
While extra-Parliamentary Opposition is often associated with the left, that is far from the case around the globe and even in the UK. It wasn’t until Blair’s second term (from memory) that far right inspired farmers for action, fuel protests and the Countryside Alliance were on the streets. We can add to that the fascist fragments that did much to inspire riots in early August.
Politics in the age of social media moves faster.
Meanwhile if the Tories do want to sort themselves out they need something like Peel’s Tamworth Manifesto(1834) issued after their previous worse defeat in 1832. It recognised the need for the Tories to modernise, to be democratic (for the time) and appeal to a wider layer of people. I don’t think there is a Peel amongst the current six leadership contenders however
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