The Liz Truss lock: Why the Conservative Party is stuck in limbo
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By pandering to the Conservative Party members, are the leadership candidates at risk of ignoring what the rest of the country wants?
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In brief…
- Conservative Party members are set to decide the next leader this month, with a choice between two moderate and two right-wing candidates.
- The membership has appeared to lurch further to the right in recent years, opting for more radical candidates like Liz Truss.
- The News Agents say this could be out of touch with the rest of the electorate, raising questions as to whether the party needs to change how it chooses its leader.
What’s the story?
You might think that the Conservative Party would be searching for a rebrand after Rishi Sunak led the party to the worst defeat in its history in the general election.
It came after Boris Johnson’s scandalous reign and Liz Truss’ disastrous mini-budget.
Now, the party’s members have a decision to make as they mull over their next leader.
Do they pick a moderate like James Cleverly or Tom Tugendhat, or someone on the party’s right wing like Kemi Bechenoch and Robert Jenrick?
The News Agents have been getting a feel for what they want, or rather, what MPs and leadership candidates think they want, at the party’s conference in Birmingham.
And they say, as the membership lurches further to the right, it could be out of touch with the rest of the country.
It raises the question: Does the way the Conservative Party choose its leader damage its electability?
How will the Conservative Party choose its next leader?
Emily points out that people inside the Conservative Party have been quietly saying for years ‘why don't you land the final decision with the parliamentary party?’
Instead, there will be two rounds of voting at Westminster on 9-10 October to determine who the final two candidates will be. Conservative members will then cast their votes between 15 October and 31 October to decide the next leader.
How does Labour compare?
Labour members also have a say in who becomes their next leader. But senior figures in the party have reportedly been calling for a rule change to stop what they call the “Liz Truss lock”.
In 2022, Tory members voted for Truss to lead the party, despite her not having the support of the majority of MPs.
To avoid a repeat of a scenario like this, Starmer allies are pushing for the vote to go only to MPs when it comes to choosing a successor to the current Prime Minister.
What’s The News Agents take?
“Why do you insist on putting [the vote] out to an ever-decreasing number of members who tend to go to the sharp tack right?”, Emily says of the Tory leadership race.
She says the membership have tended to elect candidates who “have become more radical” and have “got a series of their decisions wrong”.
This has been the case with Ian Duncan Smith, Liz Truss and Michael Howard, Emily argues.
Despite this, Lewis says at the fringe events in Birmingham, he has heard people talking about the idea that the Conservative Party needs to become even more member-led.
“We need to have more tests about whether anyone is a true Conservative”, he has heard them say.
“They've convinced themselves that the last 13 to 14 years was actually them not being true enough to themselves”, Lewis adds.
Instead, most of the [leadership] candidates and other politicians have been saying that the problem at the general election was that they had “governed in too left-wing a way”.
This, Lewis says, reminds him of the Labour Conference in 2015, where Labour “convinced themselves that they just need to be a more authentic version of themselves”.
He adds: “It's a bit like when someone breaks up with you, and you think the reason they broke up with you is because you weren’t actually a true enough version of yourself and if you’re a true enough version of yourself in the future, they'll come back.
“It is a weird psychological place. Rather than actually thinking the unthinkable, which would be, ‘maybe we were the problem, maybe our beliefs were the problem in the first place.’”
