The news that James Cleverly had surprisingly been knocked out of the Tory leadership race on Wednesday afternoon was greeted with glee by the Labour Party. “Do we have to declare this as a gift as well” was a line trotted out by more than one government minister.
By selecting Kemi Badenock and Robert Jenrick to go forward to the final two of a contest that seems to have gone on longer than an Everton winless run, the Conservative MPs – all 121 of them – have now given its membership – just over 100.000 of them – the opportunity to elect a right winger with a baseball bat or a right winger in a suit as the next leader of the opposition.
On the face of it, neither Badenock nor Jenrick will pose a genuine threat to Labour. Neither have had the sense to apologise for the chaos their government caused during its fourteen-year reign, nor addressed the two major issues that polls suggest mostly interest the voters of the UK – namely the economy and public services.
Badenock wants to stary a culture war, whilst Jenrick wants a ‘New’ Conservative Party, which looks very much like Reform UK.
I’m not convinced either approach takes the Tories back to the place where they need to be if they are to have a chance of winning the next election – or even securing a better result in 2028 or 2029 than they did on 4th July.
Nevertheless, Labour MPs should not be too chipper. The hope is that the office reshuffle undertaken by Keir Starmer this week, with Sue Gray standing down as his chief of staff to be replaced with the far more Politically-savvy Morgan McSweeney – combined with a humdinger of a budget later this month – with reset things sufficiently for the government to get back on the front foot, and back on track.
We will see. It is easy to blame advisors for your travails, but I am still aghast at the absence of common sense from the principal players themselves in their inability to see the dangers of accepting clothing and spectacles from an individual Labour donor as gifts, which has led to the wheels coming off government messaging over the Summer.
Assuming Labour does get its act together – and that Rachael Reeves delivers a positive budget on 30th October – there is little doubt that they can quickly regain support and credibility, and maintain a poll lead relatively comfortably with Badenoch or Jenrick as their main opposition.
However, a failure to fix things before Christmas will see people switching off from Labour in the same way they did with the Tories following Party-gate. Despite Johnson’s revision of history in his new book, his party never recovered from his mismanagement – admittedly compounded by the aberration that was Liz Truss.
If Labour doesn’t get its act together sooner rather than later, then there is no guarantee they will win a second term. No matter who the leader of the opposition is.
The one thing worse for Labour would be the electorate transitioning from ‘You’re all the same’ to ‘They couldn’t do any worse’.
The Tories haven’t done themselves any favours this week. But that doesn’t mean Labour can’t still throw it all away.
