LONDON — The U.K. general election is still weeks away — but the battle for the soul of the Conservative Party has already begun.
Polls are currently forecasting that the party of Winston Churchill and Margaret Thatcher, which has led Britain the past 14 years, could be reduced to its lowest number of seats in the House of Commons for more than a century.
Such a rout would inevitably lead to the swift departure of the current Tory leader and prime minister, Rishi Sunak, and an immediate struggle over where the party heads next.
Some activists fear the prospect of a Donald Trump-style takeover by radically-minded right-wingers sympathetic to the upstart Nigel Farage, leader of the rival Reform UK party. Others speculate that an electoral collapse on this scale could threaten the very existence of the near-200-year-old Conservative Party.
That means the coming battle to pick Sunak’s successor will be one which defines the Conservatives’ future for years to come.
“The stakes couldn’t be higher,” said Tim Bale, professor of politics at Queen Mary University London, and author of “The Conservative Party after Brexit.”
“The contest between the two sides has the potential to really catch fire.”
Under current party rules it will be down to those remaining Tory MPs who manage to hold onto their seats on July 4 to whittle down the various leadership candidates to a shortlist of two, before grassroots party members pick the winner in a final head-to-head ballot.
That gives Tory MPs an outsized role in shaping the party’s future — meaning that exactly who keeps their seat at the election, and who fails to do so, will be key to the outcome.
Analysis by POLITICO suggests the contest will be close, with the rump of Conservative parliamentarians predicted to survive election night splitting fairly evenly between centrists and those on the right of the party.
Among the 140 of the 650 Commons seats projected to stay Tory in the most recent YouGov MRP projection, 44 candidates backed the right-leaning Liz Truss for leader in the final round of the last leadership contest in 2022 — a reasonable measure of where their allegiances lie — while 49 backed the more centrist Sunak. (A further 30 Tory candidates expected to win their seats are newcomers, while 17 did not declare an allegiance in 2022.)
They were also evenly split along the ideological spectrum when selecting from a much broader slate of prospective leaders in the first round of the same 2022 leadership race.
A vicious row to come
Henry Hill, acting editor of the influential website ConservativeHome, predicted that, given this likely schism, the aftermath of an election defeat would involve a “vicious” row between the Tory left and right.
He said many in the party would be looking for a candidate who could “transcend it, or rise above it and do something more useful” rather than simply descending into tribal warfare.
Senior Conservatives have already begun jostling for position — while publicly insisting they are still focused on backing Sunak and improving the party’s fortunes ahead of the election.
Business Secretary Kemi Badenoch and former home secretaries Suella Braverman and Priti Patel have all been widely discussed as leadership hopefuls by MPs on the right.
On the moderate wing of the party, competition has stepped up among wannabes amid predictions that their current standard-bearer, Penny Mordaunt, will struggle to hold her seat of Portsmouth North.
That has boosted the prospects of Security Minister Tom Tugendhat, who is “working quietly in the background” on testing the water with colleagues for their support, according to one Conservative aide, granted anonymity in order to speak freely. The claim was backed up by several others.
Health Secretary Victoria Atkins is seen as another strong contender by liberal Conservatives hunting for a potential leader with a good chance of actually holding their seat in the expected electoral bloodbath to come.
Preparing for battle
One member of the Tory Reform Group — the main caucus of moderate Tory MPs — said their priority was to find a candidate to unite behind and so avoid splitting the centrist vote, as has happened in previous contests.
The same person — also granted anonymity to speak candidly — said there was “a lot of concern about the potential for a lurch to the right,” adding that Tory moderates needed to “defend our values to the hilt” in the face of the threat from Nigel Farage and Reform UK.
Reform has been gaining in the polls since Farage spectacularly announced his intention to stand at the election, with some right-leaning Conservative figures, including Braverman, arguing there should now be a place for him inside the Tory tent.
Bale said that if Reform does well on July 4, there would be “a bunch of Braverman-style MPs who will be up for uniting the right by inviting Farage and his colleagues into the Tory fold.”
He predicted that any fightback from the moderates would depend on their mettle. “Will they have the cojones to take on the right? Frankly, I’m not sure they will,” Bale added.
Among the other candidates likely to throw their hats into the ring in a future leadership contest are the Defense Secretary Grant Shapps, a centrist, and the former Immigration Minister Robert Jenrick, once a solid Sunak ally but who has become increasingly outspoken on migration in recent months. Both have been “putting friendly phone calls in to people,” one Tory candidate said.
However, as the same would-be MP pointed out wearily: “If the polls are right, most of the candidates won’t be there for a leadership race — and I won’t be there to vote for them either.”
Emilio Casalicchio contributed reporting.