Elizabeth Piper
LONDON (Reuters) – The recriminations and fight for the top job among Britain’s Conservative MPs began long before Labor’s crushing election defeat on Thursday, with some party insiders saying the party faced the prospect of being out of power within a decade.
After 14 years in power – the last eight of which were marked by chaos and division after the Brexit vote – the Conservative Party now faces an internal battle among lawmakers, grassroots members and donors over whether to move further to the right or return to the centre.
Keir Starmer’s Labor Party won Thursday’s election by a landslide, taking a huge majority in parliament, while the Conservatives, fueled by anger over falling living standards and a resurgence of right-wing reform Britain, The party suffered its worst performance in the party’s long history.
Reuters spoke to 20 politicians, party members and strategists who said the expected resignation of Prime Minister Rishi Sunak as leader of the Conservative Party would trigger a conflict between the party’s support apparatus and right-wing media, financial backers, A battle between the think tank and the outspoken members.
The result will help determine whether a party that has ruled Britain alone or jointly for about 100 years since its founding in 1834 can rebuild a country from serious decline.
A senior Tory ex-MP has predicted there will be “carnage” as the party seeks a new direction and embarks on a return to power.
“The party is going to suffer some kind of mental breakdown and it’s going to last for a while,” said the former MP, who spoke on condition of anonymity. “Then it will be necessary to find a way forward.”
Several MPs are expected to compete to replace Sunak, with the right wing likely to promote Priti Patel and Suela Braver, two former home ministers known for their hardline stance on immigration, party sources said Mann, and former Trade Minister Kemi Badenock.
Braverman quickly promised voters changes. “I’m sorry that my party didn’t listen to you,” she said in a speech after winning re-election. “I will do everything I can to rebuild trust. We need to listen to you and you’ve made that clear to us.”
Party sources said centrist candidates were also preparing to campaign, with James Cleverly and Tom Tugendhat, home ministers under Sunak, each named as a possible contender.
Three Conservatives have raised questions about the right-wing credentials of former immigration minister Robert Jenrick, in a sign of the debate that may lie ahead. Gather support.
Penny Mordaunt, a centrist leader in Sunak’s House of Commons who lost her seat to Labour, has also been consulting colleagues about her chances. She admitted defeat and warned the Conservatives not to talk to “a small part of themselves” as they seek to revive the party.
Peter Botting, a senior party adviser, described the leadership battle as a battle between two factions: one based on former prime minister Margaret Thatcher, a staunch free marketeer. One wing of the Conservative Party followed the modernizer David Cameron, who pursued a paternalistic “one-nation conservatism.”
“People want big personalities: big, recognizable personalities,” Botting said. “There are a lot of very forgettable people who thought they could be prime minister.”
Threat from British Reform
The former MP said the Conservatives should move to the right to meet the challenge posed by Brexit campaigner Nigel Farage’s Reform Party. Farage won a seat in parliament on his eighth try.
Although Labor won about 34% of the vote nationally, well below its 1997 landslide victory, Britain’s reformist resurgence split the right-wing vote and allowed Starmer to be elected in Britain’s first-past-the-post system. won an overwhelming majority of seats.
Tim Bell, professor of politics at Queen Mary University of London, warned that a shift to the right would go against “what wins elections at the center of British politics”.
“What we’ve seen since Brexit is that as a minority of populist politicians in the Conservative Party have become more vocal, a silent majority of centrist MPs has allowed the party to slide to the right,” he told Reuters.
As of 0800 GMT, Labor held 411 of 645 seats in the 650-seat parliament, while the Conservatives held 119 seats, the BBC reported.
The Reform Party has won only four seats so far, but received more than 4 million votes.
The performance of the Reform Party has frightened many Conservatives. Its leader Farage is an experienced campaigner who has promised to siege the Conservatives and has become the main voice of the opposition.
His success could spur members of the Conservative Party’s grassroots to pursue a more populist radical right strategy in a bid to revive its fortunes — something that would displease the party’s centrists.
Several Conservatives who spoke to Reuters said grassroots members have felt increasingly marginalized since Sunak was appointed without a vote in 2022 and want the party to restore what they see as a small state and traditional values of the free market.
Compared with the situation in 1997, when the party had to rebuild after Labor ousted an 18-year Conservative government, adviser Botting said the party’s future depended on where the energy, ideas and funding needed to rebuild the party came from. .
“We will know whether the party has a future when or if the party decides what and who to support, as opposed to against,” said Botin, who has coached hundreds of Conservative candidates over the years.
hollow
It’s a far cry from 2010, when Cameron ended the rule of the so-called “New Labour” party under former prime ministers Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, which had been in power for 13 years.
Despite winning three more elections, the Conservative Party has become increasingly ungovernable as a result of the turmoil and rancor caused by the Brexit vote.
Since Cameron, the Conservatives have had four prime ministers, three of whom were ousted by their own party, one of whom, Liz Truss, lasted just over 40 days. Truss lost his parliamentary seat in Thursday’s vote.
Almost everyone interviewed agreed that the party has hit such a low that it may struggle to mount a serious electoral challenge by the end of Labour’s scheduled five-year term.
The party became increasingly hollow – more than 70 MPs resigned before the election, including former Prime Minister Theresa May and several other ministers. Dozens of consultants and researchers have left for new jobs, and a record number of ministers have lost their seats in elections.
Some Conservatives doubt the party can effectively lead the opposition for some time.
“What’s left will be a very small, very inexperienced… Conservative parliamentary party,” the outcast Conservative MP said.
“What this basically means is that, for a few years at least, Labor will be free to campaign. We will not be in any opposition.”
Although the election results suggest that the party will have voices from the right wing of the party, it still has a solid core.
The MP said the Conservatives must change and acknowledge that the party’s center and right wing have not been able to work together over the past seven or eight years.
“We must admit that the current state of affairs is unsustainable,” said the party’s right-wing lawmaker.
Others believe the parliamentary party may try to unite in Westminster as numbers dwindle, with Botting saying the party could “come together rather than argue about ‘left’ or ‘right'”.
Ryan Shorthouse, chairman of the independent centre-right think tank Bright Blue, said the party had reached an “electoral and economic dead end”.
“There will be a fierce ideological battle in and around the Conservative Party,” said Shorthouse, whose think tank advocates center-right policies but is not affiliated with the Conservative Party.
Shorthouse said his organization was undertaking a strategic review to position itself as a cross-party group capable of influencing a Labor government.
“We want to … basically create a new center right.”
