A “stalking horse” candidate is no longer possible. MPs must use a no confidence vote or a visit from “the grey suits” to force a leader out.
The Conservative Party, a former David Cameron aide recently told me, «is not a sentimental creature». When the Tories regard a leader as irrevocably damaged, they rarely hesitate to act. Margaret Thatcher and Iain Duncan Smith were both finished off by their party before the electorate had the chance.
The Conservative leadership rules make it far easier to remove a leader than their Labour equivalent. To trigger a vote of confidence, at least 15 per cent of Tory MPs (48 at present) must write to the 1922 Committee chair Graham Brady ( whom I interviewed last year) requesting one. Only Brady knows for certain how many there are. The epistolary assassins are guaranteed anonymity – unless they choose to make their intentions public.
Under Brady’s predecessor, Michael Spicer, the letters required annual renewal but they now remain on file unless withdrawn. Should the number reach 48, the 1922 chairman will consult with May and determine the date of a confidence vote “as soon as possible in the circumstances prevailing”.
If the Conservative leader wins a majority in the subsequent ballot she remains in office and is rewarded with a year’s immunity. If she loses, she is obliged to resign (unlike a Labour leader) and barred from standing in the leadership election that follows.
The last Tory leader to be removed through these means was Duncan Smith. On 27 October 2003,18 days after the Tory leader’s dismal conference speech, Spicer received the 25 letters required to trigger a ballot (which Duncan Smith subsequently lost by 90 votes to 75).
Though some frequently suggest otherwise, it is no longer possible for MPs to stand as a «stalking horse» (as Tory wet Anthony Meyer did against Thatcher). Until 1998, MPs only required a proposer and a seconder to initiate a leadership contest. But under the rule changes introduced by William Hague, MPs must now wait until a leader loses a confidence vote or resigns before standing. They must then attract nominations from at least 15 per cent of MPs to enter the contest. Candidates are eliminated in successive MP ballots until only two remain to face the membership.
In November 1990, after winning the first round of the Tory leadership contest against Michael Heseltine by 204 to 152 votes, Thatcher was persuaded by a cabinet delegation to resign rather than «fight on and fight to win» (the prime minister fell four votes short of the total she needed to prevent a second round).
As Theresa May’s opponents remain short of the 48 names they require to trigger a confidence vote, they aim to persuade the PM to depart through informal means (such as a visit from «the grey suits»). But as long as she retains the support of most of the cabinet, May will be confident of survival.
There is no agreed successor and some Tory Remainers fear the election of a «harder Brexiteer» (the Conservative grassroots will likely favour the most Eurosceptic candidate in the run-off).
The government is midway through the Brexit negotiations and can ill afford to lose yet more time. EU trade talks would be further delayed and Brussels would be well-placed to extract the maximum concessions from Britain.
Finally, having lost their majority earlier this year, the Conservatives are loath to do anything that could prompt a second general election. Labour would begin as favourites and Tory MPs sincerely fear the consequences of a Corbyn victory.
Faced with a choice between bad and worse, most Tory MPs believe that May’s survival represents the former.
When the killers are Muslims, American politicians – particularly if they are Republican – move quickly to analysis and policy solutions. The problem, they insist, is Islam and the solutions are to invade Muslim countries, keep out Muslim immigrants and step up surveillance of Muslims already in America.
When a 64-year-old white former accountant kills at least 59 in Las Vegas with rapid gunfire, there is nothing to see here, move along please and pray for the victims.
Whether or not the issue is the easy availability of guns, the frequency of mass killings in America – and a murder rate between three and five times higher than in other developed countries – suggests that something peculiarly American is at work. But many Americans, including President Trump, don’t want to think about that.
The Catalan myth
I suppose it is all right for Jeremy Corbyn to denounce the Spanish government for its violent attempt to suppress an independence referendum in Catalonia, though I would have thought Theresa May has enough to do without appealing “directly” to the Spanish PM, as Corbyn demands. Yet I hope that he and his allies haven’t fallen for the narrative of a plucky, oppressed minority fighting fascist monsters for freedom. Catalonia is one of Spain’s richest regions (the Basque country, where some are also keen on independence, is even richer), with a GDP per capita 60 per cent higher than that of Andalusia. Its independence supporters resent their taxes going to poorer regions, just as many Londoners do. I trust that no Labour leader would back a breakaway from the UK by London and the south-east.
Universal blunders
A former minister told me recently how he was amazed to find, when a new policy was proposed in his department, that the civil service did not immediately produce briefings on previous attempts to address whatever problem it was supposed to solve, the results of those attempts and the lessons to be learned. This year’s bungled introduction of universal credit is surely an example of such failure.
MPs report that many people face eviction from their homes because their existing benefits have stopped while they wait six weeks for the new one. Labour’s introduction of a tax credit scheme in 2003 went spectacularly wrong for almost exactly the same reasons. David Blunkett, then a cabinet minister, noted in his diary “tens of thousands of people without any money and no sign of their getting it in the near future”.
The story is told in The Blunders of Our Governments (2013), written by the late Anthony King and Ivor Crewe. Labour’s scheme required millions of indigent people, many of whom had never previously completed a tax return, to fill out complex forms about their previous year’s earnings, estimate their earnings for the next year and notify the authorities each time their circumstances changed. Nearly two million eligible people failed to claim. Some 300,000 who did claim didn’t receive their payments in time. Two million were overpaid, causing further distress when, at the end of the year, they received peremptory demands to repay what seemed to them enormous sums. As the ombudsman observed, the system created “in-built financial insecurity”.
Labour’s tax credits failed largely because the ministers and civil servants who designed them didn’t understand that poor families often live hand-to-mouth, managing their finances on a weekly basis not across a whole year. It seems incredible that such a recent lesson has not been learned.
The meanies’ money
The Tory leader of Westminster Council, Nickie Aiken, proposes to invite the borough’s richest property owners to pay a voluntary mansion tax.
