Priti Patel’s Tory leadership bid won’t get past her deep unpopularity

Good morning. Who is winning the Conservative leadership election? If Techne UK, the pollster who produced the most accurate forecasts in the 2022 contest, is right, then the answer is James Cleverly. Opinion polling for party leadership races in the UK has been consistently reliable thus far and I see no reason to doubt it.

But who should they pick? Because it is the summer, and because many of you have asked, I have decided to alienate all the possible contenders by writing the case for their leadership but also the argument against. In both cases I am writing from a Conservative perspective, as I don’t really see the value in me saying “they should aim to be a little more like Major or Blair” six times.

We will be looking at contenders in reverse order as suggested by the bookmakers — we started with Mel Stride and now we move on to Priti Patel.

In favour

The Conservative party lost the general election because people did not think the government deserved to be re-elected. The 2022 to 2024 period was particularly destructive to the Tory party; between Partygate, the 49 days of Liz Truss, and Rishi Sunak’s combination of listless gimmickry in office and his conscious decision to move the Conservative party away from the ground on which it fought and won the 2019 election.

After a party loses an election, voters look for a sign that it has understood that it deserved to lose and that it has changed accordingly.

The last four leaders of the opposition to win a general election — Margaret Thatcher, Tony Blair, David Cameron and Keir Starmer — all made big changes to their party. Some of those changes were symbolic (both Thatcher and Cameron changed the party logo, Tony Blair rewrote the back of the party’s membership cards, while Starmer made the British flag the centrepiece of the Labour party’s leaflets and branding). All made profound shifts away from the positions on which their parties had lost the elections of 1974, 1992, 2005 and 2019.

One reason why first-term oppositions mostly become second-term oppositions is that the people they choose as leader and the team around them don’t want to, or aren’t plausibly able to, present themselves as the leader of a changed party.

That Priti Patel has been on the backbenches since the fall of Boris Johnson, and endorsed neither Rishi Sunak nor Liz Truss in the summer election that followed, makes it easier for her to expunge the smell of the past two years than it is for the other candidates.

Against

The case against Priti Patel is that she is really unpopular with the public, she has been in the public eye for a long time. Even though rhetorically she is better placed to move away from the failures of the past she is one of a handful of Conservatives that the average person can identify and already has strong feelings about. She is therefore unlikely to be able to change how people feel about her or the Conservative party.

She was found by Boris Johnson’s ethics adviser to have broken the ministerial code by bullying civil servants. One of my more grimly utilitarian views is that I primarily care about workplace bullying because it is an issue of poor management: I don’t really believe that bullying is an effective style of management, and it leads to poor outcomes. (Good column by Andrew Hill on that here.)

Patel’s management style coupled with her unpopularity, would lead to a poorly run party machine led by an out-of-favour leader. The Conservatives tried that in July and it did not end well.

Now try this

This week, I mostly listened to WHO AM I by Berwyn while writing my column (in today’s paper!).

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