The Conservative Party's drawn-out leadership contest has allowed Labour to seize the political initiative and paint a damaging picture of the Tories' legacy.
When a small number of Conservative backbenchers gathered in a stuffy House of Commons committee room in mid-July, the meeting received little attention. Their party had just been brutally booted out of power. Almost three-quarters of their colleagues had lost their seats. The media were focused on more pressing matters: Keir Starmer was busy getting to work as Labour ’s first Prime Minister in 14 years.
After lengthy deliberations, the 1922 executive decided to back the second option. It was a major mistake. Since then, the vacuum at the top of the Conservative Party has allowed Labour to embed the idea that the Tories’ legacy was even worse than anybody had realised.The briefest study of recent political history should have alerted the Tories to this risk.
The job requires strategic thinking, effective communication, sound judgement and an ability to connect with an electorate – all traits that the Tory Badenoch has her strengths as a politician but many of her colleagues worry that she is a loose cannon who could start an argument in a morgue. She appears to have spent the past few weeks doing her very best to prove them right.
As Keir Starmer and David Cameron have shown, the Leader of the Opposition job is about flexibility – both were called political chameleons, both ended up as Prime Minister. The job suits pragmatists, not idealogues. Simply shouting your deeply-held beliefs at anyone who will listen will not cut it. His rivals have struggled to land blows on him, in no small part because he is not needlessly controversial and is popular across the party. The main criticism levelled at him – that he does not stand for anything obvious – was also levelled at Blair, Cameron and Starmer when they were Leader of the Opposition.
Conservative Party Leadership Contest Labour Politics UK Election
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