The common sense among the press pack and (always nameless) MPs is that giving members a vote for party leader is a dreadful mistake, and it should be left to very sensible honourable members to select their first among equals. Truss's disastrous leadership proves this. And the argument might have a point, if it wasn't for the fact that she had more MPs in her camp than Rish! Sunak by the end of the leadership contest. But clearly the mood amongst leading Tories is this cannot be allowed again, and so a members' vote has to be guarded against and a coronation declared. Therefore, the contest timetable set a high floor for participation. Whereas the summer saw practically the entire parliamentary party put themselves forward, Truss's would-be successors have to find 100 nominations each. If there are three candidates who make the cut, the lowest place is eliminated and the final two go to the membership. The MPs' ballot takes place early afternoon on Monday, and via the wonderful medium of the internet party members will have to have cast their votes by 11am the following Friday, and bang. It will all be done. Barely any time for a televised hustings and their associated embarrassments.
There are two problems. During the summer the party abandoned electronic voting because they were warned about the scope for overseas interference. All it would take is for Vladimir Putin to order in the troll farms and subvert the vote. Except the Tory elite are so up to their neck in Russian oligarch money and influence it wouldn't make a blind bit of difference. But still, a whiff of overseas interference would not be helpful for Tory prospects.
And then there is the law of unintended consequences. By setting the nomination bar high, the 1922 Executive are trying to engineer the result for Sunak. With the briefcase coup installing Jeremy Hunt as Chancellor and Grant Shapps at Home, a Sunak premiership would top it off. But they weren't reckoning on Boris Johnson. According to a tracker over at Guido, as of writing 44 MPs have publicly declared for Johnson. Sunak is on 30, and Penny Mordaunt on 15. By carving out the way in for far right candidates (i.e. Suella Braverman and Kemi Badenoch), there's only really one choice for that wing of the party.
Just stop for a moment and take in the spectacle. Dozens of Conservative MPs are going public with their support for a candidate who was sacked by his party less than two months ago because of his cack-handed cover up of a sexual molestation scandal. Nothing has changed since Johnson went off to spend more time with his American tour of six-figured speaking engagements. Public support hasn't warmed in the interim, nor has enthusiasm among the parliamentary party. Throughout November the Privileges Committee findings about his Downing Street partying will capture the headlines, and dominate them if he becomes leader again. But he has retained enough of his standing among the party membership to win the ballot. Johnson is only "taking soundings" at present, but his return presents the briefcase establishment serious difficulties. Do they move heaven and earth to make sure Sunak and Mordaunt are the final two? Are they even capable of doing this?
And this underlines the big problem the Tories have. Assuming someone can swoop in and make everything better is a false prospectus. If Sunak gets in, Andrew Bridgen will call for his resignation within minutes of taking office and the right, and not a few red wall'ers, will prove to be a pain in the arse. Who knows if he'll bring back his National Insurance increase? Mordaunt isn't as well known to have earned enough enemies yet, but with competing policy priorities and her proximity to briefcase Toryism the right will likely give her the same headache. And if it's Johnson, we're in resignations and painful by-elections territory and many MPs will simply refuse to serve in his cabinet. Rumours of defections to Labour persist, and the right wing press - apart from the Express and Mail aren't uniformly onside. As far as the Tories are concerned, it's division and chaos all the way down.
Truss didn't have to blow up the Tory party and make it an ungovernable mess. But she did. By stoking inflation and forcing the increase in interest rates, she made the cardinal error of directly attacking the Tories' mass base. Winning them back is a big ask for whoever succeeds her, and is surely now a case of damage limitation. A matter of of making sure a rout doesn't turn into a massacre.
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The main plot line for the coming week is the Return of Johnson. The frothing "how hard is your Brexit? Look at mine!" fundamentalists such as the Bruges Group, John Redwood and company will be desperate to see him back, as will the majority of party members. Many in the country will also wish it (depressing, but true). So he will have considerable momentum should he wish to use it. Meanwhile, the briefcase suit brigade will be working to slide Rishi in to post. It is possible a third candidate could slip in between the cracks a they two groups wrestle. The Mordaunt? Fascinating - but also horrifying.
Of course, if this country were in any way rational a mechanism would exist to force an election (perhaps, three PMs and you're out?) Especially if, as seems inevitable, whoever wins will want to make changes that were never in the manifesto. Change leader and change policies? Surely that wipes out any mandate? Perhaps our constitution should have a clause for making a cross-party government of national unity a requirement if a GE is not called in such circumstances? Democracy? Shamocracy! So long as they feed their donors.
Am I being ageist to suggest that the Conservative membership might not be as au fait with internet voting as other demographics?
It might come down to which candidate has the most switched on support, or, in-house domestic IT support.
Actually that would be me, so, if I was a Tory party member I’d be able to vote, but otherwise I’d bet on there being some problems.
On the human level I'm sorry for Truss. This is a terrible thing to happen to her; total humiliation. As a Labour supporter I'm happy to see the Tories in chaos but for the good of the country it's another matter. There should be a general election to put an end to this nonsense but I fear the Tories will drag on for another two years. I don't see how they can recover. Major's government never recovered from Black Wednesday even though Ken Clarke did a good job as Chancellor and the economy was booming by 1997.
Also with Black Wednesday Major and Lamont were at least trying to shore up the pound to keep us in the ERM, so there was a point to the chaos, but the plummet of the pound this time round was completely unnecessary!
I just have to point out that nobody has done a good job as Chancellor for the past at least 40 years. We haven't got to this point because of what happened in the past couple of years, or even the past 15. This has been coming for decades.
We built our economy on debt backed by the promise of growth fuelled, literally, by cheap energy derived from fossil fuels. That dependency on a continuous increase in affordable energy was always going to come back to bite us. Growth is slowing, and stalling in some cases, and the cost of energy has been slowly going up in real terms for a long time, as the availability of cheap oil and gas falters.
That is if we ignore the fact we can't continue to use fossil fuels at the rate needed to grow out of debt without making the planet more or less uninhabitable, nor can the planet sustain the ever growing use of resources and outflow of waste.
Debt is essentially borrowing from the future, and while money debt can be cancelled, resource debt cannot. If we continue trying to grow, we will find that the energy required is no longer easily available, nor affordable. We have reached the turning point, and all the economic problems are a result of this. Money is a means of allocating resources, but the underlying constraint is the resources, not the money. No Chancellor has ever appreciated that, and pretty much no government globally yet understands it.
At the moment the whole finance edifice is trying to solve the resource conundrum with financial engineering. This can't work, because no matter how clever the scheme, ultimately there is a physical limit to what the planet can support, so unless we work to that limit, we are doomed.
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