Leadership contests are what the Tory party does best

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A strange week in Britain, when various things we had banished from memory came back to haunt us: cold weather, Phillip Schofield and — most surprisingly of all — the Conservative party.

Ah, the Tories! Their annual conference was a buoyant affair. Were they contrite about the state of the UK? No, it’s Labour’s fault. “Listen, they have had 14 years to prepare for government. Where’s the vision?” Robert Jenrick, frontrunner for the Tory leadership, told the faithful. Jenrick boasts about his parents’ ties to the metals industry — they certainly produced one incredible brass neck.

The conference motif was verbs beginning “re-”. Renew. Rebuild. Although not remember. Indeed the party exhibited the short-term memory loss associated with a severe blow to the head, which I suppose is what they suffered in July’s election. Tory members are not interested in a clear-eyed view of the past, which is lucky as they’re the target market for Boris Johnson’s memoir.

Their last proper leadership contest, won by Liz Truss in 2022, was described to me by an MP as “a circular firing squad composed of people without any weapons training”. That description doesn’t fit this time. First, two of the candidates have weapons training (James Cleverly and Tom Tugendhat are both ex-forces). Second, it’s clear that leadership contests are what the Tories do best. In fact, the party should streamline itself and make them its main product offering, the way Marks and Spencer seems to basically just sell food.

Jenrick is pitching himself as the new Johnson, and committed to the part by getting several basic facts wrong. He said he’s in politics for “the people for whom there is no pressure group pressing their cases”. Just in case you thought he was the same Robert Jenrick who approved a planning application for billionaire Richard Desmond after sitting next to him at a party fundraiser.

Jenrick is probably the candidate voters would most like to go for a drink with, in the sense that they definitely couldn’t handle the conversation sober. He wants Britain to leave the European Convention on Human Rights: “It boils down to this: it’s leave or remain.” Hmm, any precedent for such a straight choice backfiring?

It was too much for some of his colleagues. “I am very sorry to have to say it, but that speech of Robert Jenrick’s was lazy, mendacious, simplistic tripe,” said fellow Conservative MP Jesse Norman. Yes! No other party does infighting so well.

Norman supports Kemi Badenoch, the former business secretary who recently claimed: “I never have gaffes . . . I never have to clarify.” This week, she criticised maternity pay and suggested up to 50,000 civil servants “should be in prison”.

Cleverly, former foreign and home secretary, is the sensible contender: he’s on record joking about the date rape drug Rohypnol, but only once. “Let’s be more normal,” he told the conference.

Not yet, James. The Tories are where they were in 1997 and 2001, and where Labour were in 2010 and 2015: they don’t want to be normal, they want to be themselves. We were treated to four candidates talking about leadership, while being unable to admit that Brexit was folly, that the climate transition has fewer costs than the alternative and that, while we’d all like low taxes, someone has to pay for pensions and elderly care.

George Orwell wrote that poverty brought relief: “You have talked so often of going to the dogs — and well, here are the dogs, and you have reached them, and you can stand it.” So it is with opposition. Under their next leader, the Conservatives may or may not ape Nigel Farage’s policies. But already they have imbibed Farage’s main lesson: politics is much more bearable if you forget about the realities of governing.

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