Coffee House Shots
Are we in for a 'dirty' Tory leadership contest?
Get three months of the spectator for just three pounds. Go to spectator.co.uk/trial. Welcome to Coffee House Chots for Spectators Daily Podcasts. I'm Fraser Nelson. The conservative leadership rules have just been announced and it seems that Rishi Sunnai isn't going to be going to California any time soon. He's going to be leading the party until November. Katie, tell us latest. Yes, so there's been a debate going on for a few weeks now on the exact timings and length of the Tory leadership contest. That I think the MPs could not decide for such a long time and it went against the views of some on the board and perhaps some close to Rishi Sunnak. I think it was a hint of how this Tory leadership might go being rather divisive. Ultimately, it's the MPs, or at least the bulk of MPs who have won out, it seems. The 1922 committee met on Monday. Now, there still needs to be signed off by the conservative board on Wednesday, but I think the expectation amongst MPs, amongst those on the board, and amongst those around Rishi Sunnak, is this ultimately just needs to be rather stamped. It means that one proposition was to have the leadership contest either wrap up just before conference or at conference, almost as the X factor one, where you'd have knockout rounds at the conference, the winner announced on the second last day and then the speech. That is not likely to happen. Instead, the plan is to have the leader announced in early November, the second of November. Tomorrow, you will have nominations open. To enter the race and be eligible, you need to have 10 nominations, one of which can be from yourself and one can be from a second, so you only need really eight MPs other than two in your own team to back you, and you have until Monday lunchtime to get that eight. Now, it's 10 and total, but yet a proposal a seconder and then eight MPs and you can propose yourself. Then by Monday lunchtime, we'll know who has made it into the playing field. They will then have a lovely long summer on which they can go on holiday or they can tour Tory associations. I think that while some candidates believe they can have a holiday in August, they will soon see their rivals are taking their holidays in various constituencies around the country of a high number of Tory members and may think again about financing or wherever they are thinking. They will come back in September. At that point, you will have knockout rounds to get them to a final fall. That final fall will then go to Tory party conference where Tory party conference will become a beauty parade, a vanity contest. We'll see how it goes and they will have a chance to address the members. The funny thing here is they will be addressing the members, but ultimately, the members do not get to pick on the final fall. They get to pick on the final two. After this contest at the conference, where the membership will get up close and personal, you will then have the MPs whittle it down to a third or two, perhaps taking in the thoughts of the grassroots, and then you have voting ahead of the leader being unveiled on the second of November, at which point they probably have about a day of coverage before focus moves back to the US presidential contest even here in the UK. That is how it's going to go. I think it's probably very drawn out. It's one way of looking at it. Some in the party think this is genius because it gives them time for wounds to heal. Others think that this is completely naval gazing, self-focused, and has the potential to be quite a dirty, long contest for the Tory party looks obsessed with itself. People can take their own view on that. I think in terms of money, there's also a factor, which is donors aren't going to put money into the Tory party, into the know who the leader is, and there's probably not going to be much money behind Tory conference, given it's not going to offer any clarity on this question. James, one thing that jumps out from what Katie was saying is that they're still going to stick with the format, where the MPs will choose a final two and the members will vote in it. There were some people, George Freeman was one of them, who was saying, "You know, let's do it the other way around. Let the members choose two or three candidates, and the MPs can choose between that." So it still seems of a system in which the MPs have a quite a lot of power, and you can tactically vote to try to manipulate the final two. I know that Liam Fox in 2005 and Kami Badenach last time around, both can have felt that the MPs were voting in a way that kept them away from the members. So I imagine there's a lot of members who will hang on. This formula didn't exactly work last time around. So why are you sticking with it now? Yeah, I think that will be something that members are talking about. Of course, the difficulty for them is that other than the ultimate weapon of how they choose to vote in that leadership contest, there isn't a kind of recourse mechanism, there isn't a kind of same internal party democracy to kind of express that satisfaction. I'll be interested to see how each candidate plays to those concerns and fears of the grassroots. I was interested to see Robert Genrich last week setting out his stall in an article for Conservative Home talking about how he would reform the party. I can expect that given that the Conservatives are no longer in government anymore, party reform will be a kind of key staple out of all the leadership contenders because they want to deliver for them. And they'll say, "Vote for me and I'll do this and this to change the party." Can selections likely be a key focus or so campaigns given the dismal way in which the selection campaign was for? So I expect all these different things to be an issue. I'd say, I mean, the interesting thing, of course, is kind of in some ways it returns to the old system which the Conservatives had prior to 1965, which was the magic circle, the consultation. 1963 is perhaps analogous to this, which is that that was a conference where leadership candidate emerged. That was Alec Douglas Huem emerged off for a few days of frenzied campaigning. There was Quentin Hulk's waters with Q badges, Randolph Churchill going around doing this bit, and a bit like this time, which is that you're going to have four contenders, but obviously only the MPs can vote on them. The membership can't vote on the military conference, so a lot of informal canvassing, that kind of thing going wrong with the members, but actually we'll actually get down to a final two, which as Katie says, is going to be a little bit like 2001, which of course the tour membership was due to be announced. The result of that contest was due to be announced on the day of 9/11, of course, had to be moved to the following day when no one got any publicity whatsoever. So Katie, I wonder how many candidates were going to get here. I mean, there's a 121 Conservative MPs, so technically we could have 12 candidates, and a lot of people will be standing, not because they think they're going to win, but because they're laying down a marker to get seem to be in the shadow cabinet. So do we have any indication of is this going to be a Tory-awacky racist, a kind of summer freak show more than the leadership bit? Yes, speaking to the various campaign teams that are yet not official this morning, I think that it's quite predicted in the sense, those who I think are quite far ahead are disappointed by how low the threshold is, because it is just going to mean you have loads of candidates. As opposed, loads who are thinking, I could be the David Cameron, or I could be the outsider who comes in the race from nowhere, are pretty happy, because I think this is going to be quite easy to get into the race on. Listen, incredibly low threshold, just 10 MPs, including yourself. Particularly remember, October 23, she was 100 MPs at the time. That was a very high threshold, a very low threshold. So this is obviously designed to get as many candidates as possible on the race. I'm personally quite puzzled by the wisdom of some of these things, but perhaps it's because I lack the wisdom to truly appreciate it. One of the problems the Tory party has is that, where she's in a king government, despite having office and the status that comes up cannot get voters to listen to him. Now, the Tory party will probably get more attention in a leadership contest than they will after they pick their leader. I think often it can generate a false sense that people care, and then as soon as actually it's picked, everyone starts moving back to focusing on the party and government, which in this case has a very big majority. Perhaps they think by extending it, people are going to be listening to what they're saying. But I think the risk is, if you have eight or nine candidates, it's not really going to be a battle of ideas. I think it risks being quite chaotic, and also they'll be incentive for those who have a smaller following, a less established, to say quite wacky things, or to go to the right or to the left, to make them voices heard. And you potentially have a summer of the Tory party just looking very messy, which is how it's looked for some time. And I also think there's a problem of party conference, which is Rishi Sunak. He has obviously agreed now to stay on to November. I think that's longer than he first envisioned. Let's put it lightly. When he made that promise to do what the party wanted, I think he thought, get to the summer, they're sorted out, and then he'd go off wherever he wants to be, whether it's Yorkshire and America. Instead, he's going to be hanging on. But he ultimately is a lame duck shadow cabinet, where people are not going to be paying particular attention. Is Rishi Sunak going to be in charge of this party conference? I doubt it. Therefore, who's in charge? The new chairman and perhaps the four candidates campaign teams, are they going to be able to agree on a format? One idea I heard was put forward would be that every candidate would get a day at the conference, so you could have cameo day, generic day, cleverly day. I'm obviously making pretty days. Ten days right now, the way it's going to be. Before, by the time we get to conference, in theory, you could have Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, and each gets to take over the conference for a day. That, obviously, sounds has the potential to be very entertaining for journalists. I'm not sure it's going to be much entertaining for anyone else. James, you could say that the 2005 conference in Blackpool, that was regarded as something which went right, because everybody assumed David Davis was going to win. You had David Willitz was even backing David Davis, very unlikely pairing, and then out of nowhere, David Cameron comes along and gives a very good speech contrasted to David Davis's bad one, and then it turned. In Tory folklore, you look back to that. That conference almost 20 years ago and think, "Look, that was a time where the theatre of conference, having different people on different stage, was able to juxtapose the relative merits." Maybe that's what they're going for at this time, just trying to think, "Well, let's not choose to do the conference. Let's make conference the gladiatorial arena, after which they will find as best they can." And then, on the strength of those performances, the members will vote, although God knows how many candidates they'll have to vote on. I think the danger is, of course, is that we find in political journalism so often these things we think there'll be some breakthrough, and actually there isn't. So I imagine all those, the four contenders, if we get to each make a speech at the conference, and they'll all be aware of the lessons of 2005 when David Davis went off for his holiday in summer and didn't spend any time preparing his speech, was historically judged over a poor speech, David Cameron made a good speech, and therefore we know the rest of his history. So I think they'll all go and make decent speeches. The question is, actually, by going along, as Katie says, there are lots of problems with it, and I think that in terms of the money, the financing, there are some predictions today in the press that it's going to be even worse than 1997 in terms of corporate attendees. I think it will be really bad for corporate attendees, because ultimately, Labor have a big majority, so there will be less interest anyway in terms of, and you always saw that soon after Boris Johnson won, there was less interest in the Labor Conference the first year, as you get closer to an election, it comes back. But there would still be light interest in, obviously, a new leader and the shadow cabinet, but there's no new leader, and it's quite hard to guess who it's going to be if there's four candidates, and there's four different potential shadow cabinets. So I think it even further decreases that. And that's the argument the Conservative board has been making to MPs, which is there really isn't much money left. You have to be quite careful because we're draining money at the moment, and we need to stop bringing in more money, and we're not going to have that until we have a leader. MPs have not been particularly mindful of the argument saying, "In the long term, we need to do this." But there's a chance this comes up to a hard reality, which is MPs can decide what they think is best. The risk is it's a messy leadership contest, and they can't bring in money, and then whatever the new leader inherits, or if anything, they just don't inherit very much at all. And Keir Starmer had this problem, and he took over from Jeremy Corbyn. Obviously, the Tories do not have a heavily lost-making music festival in the shape of Labour Live to deal with. There was not Tory Live, but he had to deal with the fact there was very little money. It's why they had to keep some Corbyn staff on initially, because they could not afford all these redundancy payouts. And I think that the Tories are going to potentially have a similar issue when they go in. And other things, for instance, is that unlike 2005, Michael Howard had the stature to deliver a leader speech to that conference, and with someone who was respected across the party, having made gains in that election. I'm not sure, really, right now, the figures of stature, the traditionally we'd call them the remaining grey suits, who are going to keep it all together. And I think the danger of the Conservatives, they then spend four months attacking each other. I already know some camps will be pushing for more hustings, because they want to go out across the country and do basically what the 2022 leadership was like, having lots of debates across the country. And I think the danger is that, frankly, given the tensions and bad blood between a lot of the surface, the fact, for instance, Robert Gentry resigned from the Russian ex-government. There's a lot of people who are very angry at Russian. I can also point your fingers about what happened with Boris Johnson and Nadine Dorries and the plot, et cetera. I think it could go quite badly wrong. A beauty parade could actually have quite an ugly outcome. And of course, all the more Labour's in government are going to deliver a budget in October. And is there going to be a proper opposition to hold Labour to account on all this? I mean, Katie, maybe that's what's in store for us this summer. They're not necessarily a beauty parade, but just the air being thick with poison darts, being blued by one conservative to another, as they all try to basically discredit each other ahead of the conference. Yeah. And you've already had Cami Badenock reported to say that she wants a non-aggression pact. But the fact that... Well, this has immediately had figures in other teams saying, you know, that's rich coming from Cami Badenock. She's one of the most aggressive people we've ever come across. Look, you know, what she says at Shadow Cabinet. So I think that any hopes that this doesn't get dirty is probably mistaken. Perhaps it's... Look, perhaps this podcast is completely wrong, and we are going to be proven wrong. Lots of money is going to come in, and there's going to be a well-mannered, interesting ideological debate over the summer, offers, you know, some stimulating thought. Lots of the future of consumerism and that. And so forth. The alternative is Labour can announce loaded things without having much focus on them, because everyone's watching a clown show somewhere else. And remember, of course, at the end of this, there's 121 MPs who are going to have to have most of those in the Shadow Cabinet and Shadow Ministerial roles as well. So, you know, as much as you want to kick lumps out of each other, it can't be like 2022, basically, when the kind of Trust team got in, Shelville, the Synet team, and the Synet team got in, and Shelville Trust team. You know, you basically need all hands to the pump on this one, because there's so few jobs left. And I think, I suppose, just in terms of what to expect now the next few days, I think it's going to be lots of action ahead of this Monday deadline. Potentially some surprise candidates, you know, is Melstride going to do it? Could he really do it? He's already getting accusations that Melstride could be given his, you know, links to people like Michael Gove, a plant to help Cammie Baid not be taking some central MPs. So lots of plots and talk are rushed to get these candidates. And I think, you know, there's not really been any formal decorations so far. Tom Tugenhatt keeps getting former MPs to come and back him. I'm slightly puzzled by it, and of course, former MPs don't really scream future or have votes. But I think what it speaks to, which is what the candidates are quite mindful of, is they're saying there's so much her after a historic loss that actually it does well to the party to look as though you're listening to all these views and those who've lost their seats, which I think explains some of the tactic there in terms of trying to say, you know, these people lost their seats and we think this is the answer. But the ones to really look out for are those who are, you know, still in Parliament. And that will, I think, be Thursday onwards and over the weekend. Katie and James, thanks very much. And if you're following the American election, I'd like to recommend Freddie Gray's podcast, Americano. I'm biased, but I do think it's the best single podcast in American politics. So if you would like to give it a try, then just look for it on Spotify or wherever you get your downloads from. Thanks for listening and thanks to Oscar, and we'll see you in the next video, and we'll see you in the next video. [Music]