Voters no longer wanted to live within the psychodrama of the Tory Party.
Is the Tory Party finally getting its act together? Yesterday, Tory leader Kemi Badenoch released a video in which she announced that she was throwing out Shadow Secretary of State for Justice and Shadow Lord Chancellor Robert Jenrick from the Conservative Party. Why? Because, she said, she had overwhelming evidence that he was about to leave the party and join Nigel Farage’s Reform Party, and he intended to do so in a damaging way. Jenrick, a politician of obvious ambition, had been widely tipped as a potential successor to Badenoch as leader. Later that day, he made his move.
Yesterday’s events obviously strengthen Badenoch’s grip on leadership. She has markedly improved in her role as Tory leader over time, and this improvement likely informed Jenrick’s intention to leave the party. Kneecapping Jenrick showed a Tory leader acting with competence and decisiveness.
But I’m skeptical that it will lead to Tory revival in the face of Reform’s challenge. One of the Tory Party’s great strengths in its history is its internal ruthlessness. Tories know, or ought to know, that their closest allies today will soon dip their hands in blood to backstab them tomorrow. However, in the last two decades, this internal culture has become unmoored from its connection to political survival, and instead is totally self-referential. The Tory Party has crumbled in part because its own psychodramas and frenemy-subplots have entirely subsumed the great political controversies of the day, and the small matter of governance itself.
Tory leader David Cameron put Brexit on the table just to settle internal politics of his party, and ended up opening up the biggest constitutional questions the state had faced in a century. Boris Johnson seems to have joined the Brexit side, hoping it would fail and reposition him for leadership. It succeeded, but once his friend Michael Gove stepped away from him, it was up to Theresa May to lead Brexit. Until it wasn’t. Even during Covid, serious policies like lockdown seemed to be decided as afterthoughts to the marital distractions of a Tory leader, and whether any members of the government would tell on each other for breaking the rules they imposed on anyone else. The Tory Party seemed to be made up of a club of men who stabbed each other in the face for fun, or for the psychotic thrill of bloodletting, regardless of what these dramas might inflict on the public. This schoolboy’s soap opera is how you got a government voted in to finish Brexit and get control of the country’s borders, somehow allowing the largest wave of migration into the country ever.
Understandably, voters no longer wanted to live within the psychodrama of the Tory Party. And that’s why I’m not sure this controversy helps the party along with helping Badenoch. Ultimately, this is just more Tory backbiting. The only satisfying part of it was that it only distracted people for a single afternoon, rather than derailing trade or opening up deep questions about the nation’s unwritten constitution.