Why the Tories stay ahead on political firsts

Good morning. I’m afraid I have to kick off with one of those slightly awkward peeks behind the curtain: I had assumed that today’s newsletter would be about the new leader of the opposition and their early key appointments to their new shadow cabinet. After both of the past two times a leader of the opposition was elected on a Saturday morning — Keir Starmer in 2020 and Jeremy Corbyn in 2015 — this procedure was followed.

Newly elected Tory leader Kemi Badenoch, who won 57 per cent of the vote to beat Robert Jenrick, has not appointed anyone to her shadow cabinet other than her new chief whip, Rebecca Harris, and joint Tory party chairs Nigel Huddleston and Dominic Johnson. I think this is a mistake, and not just for self-interested reasons.

Our new leader of the opposition has to populate a front bench from just 113 MPs, once you take away the select committee chairs, and those who have ruled themselves out, as James Cleverly did in this week’s Lunch with the FT. When you are appointing a shadow cabinet, particularly when you are drawing on the smallest talent pool in modern times, you are essentially having to bounce at least some people into taking unpaid jobs they don’t really want to have.

Some luckless MP without any real connection to Wales is going to have to spend half an hour every month being patronised by the secretary of state for Wales. Some close ally of Badenoch will have to eat a job they do not much care for in order to keep the party together, and so on.

It also means giving up really the only day this week that she is likely to command any attention at all, given the fact the US presidential election is taking place tomorrow.

That said, given that one of the two candidates in that contest has promised to enact a series of world-shaking tariffs that would hurt Americans, Britons, essentially everyone in the world, it may well be that Badenoch is likely to be the next prime minister, regardless of her decisions over the next few weeks.

As such (and not just because I am down a newsletter topic) it seems to be a good opportunity to revisit an article I wrote four years ago about why the first black British prime minister would probably be a) a Conservative and b) a black British African.

Points of difference

All stories are ultimately about management, other than the ones that are about commodities. That was my underlying theory in 2020 at any rate when I sought to explain the Tory party’s remarkable near-monopoly of political firsts:

The first ethnic minority prime minister in Benjamin Disraeli; the first female prime minister in Margaret Thatcher; the first British Asian to run for the role of prime minister in Sajid Javid, who also became the first British Asian to occupy the roles of chancellor and home secretary; the first Muslim to attend cabinet in Sayeeda Warsi; the first Asian-British woman to be home secretary in Priti Patel; the first ethnic minority to serve as chair of either main party in James Cleverly.

I don’t think this can be explained with reference to the Conservative party’s views “about diversity”: within that list of firsts alone you have an awful lot of different views about diversity. There isn’t really a single Conservative party view about diversity. No, I thought at the time that pretty much all of the Conservative party’s success could be explained through its institutional health:

The reason the Conservative party has been more successful at hitting these historical firsts is because it is more successful in general. From the party’s exit from the Liberal-Conservative coalition in 1922 until the rise of Tony Blair, every Conservative party leader also became prime minister. One reason to believe that the first Black British prime minister will be a Conservative is because the British prime minister is almost always a Conservative.

…Why the specificity of British and African? Well, because as the Runnymede Trust has shown, the Conservatives’ in-roads among Black voters are strongest among Black Brits whose parents or grandparents have come from Africa, as opposed to those whose parents or grandparents have come from the Caribbean, and your ability to recruit talent is inextricably tied to your appeal among that group. We can see this in the area where Labour has racked up many more firsts than the Conservatives – LGBT representation.

Indeed, the 2024 Tory leadership contest offers one way for me to claim validation. Whether the Tory party chose the candidate whom Labour and the Liberal Democrats most feared (James Cleverly), or went for one of the “we lost because we weren’t rightwing enough, Partygate was no big deal, who is to say if we should charge for the NHS or not” options (Kemi Badenoch), it was going to be able to choose an ethnic minority.

So I think this analysis has held up, broadly speaking, but I missed an important aspect of the Conservative party’s success. Not only has the Conservative party been more successful, it has a rule book that makes it easier to change leaders and be adaptable.

In the 59 years since it became illegal to discriminate in the workplace on the grounds of race — thanks in no small part to Dr Paul Stephenson, who died this week aged 87 — the Conservative party has had 13 leadership contests. Labour has had nine.

That is partly about the Tory party’s greater institutional health — it is much easier to get rid of an underperforming Conservative leader than an underperforming Labour one — but it is also a function of its dysfunction.

It has become fashionable in the Conservative party to deplore its ability to get rid of its leaders, saying it has tipped too far from being a useful advantage over Labour to a cause of internal division. Rightly or wrongly the Tories have altered the rules to make it harder, though the rule change seems like the worst of all possible worlds. The threshold was raised from 15 per cent to a third of the parliamentary party, meaning just 41 MPs could trigger a confidence vote in Kemi Badenoch. But if or when the party is back in office again it would need a third of MPs to initiate a contest.

It may be that Badenoch, the product of the Tory party’s institutional health, may well find that she leads it in a period of greater institutional dysfunction than any of her predecessors.

Now try this

It was my partner’s birthday last month, so I got her the new box set of the complete Homicide: Life on the Streets (I also got her some other gifts that were not things I would also enjoy, to be clear). It really is a terrific, terrific piece of television with an astonishing cast.

Top stories today

• Stark message sparks backlash | Rachel Reeves has suggested UK businesses can “absorb” her increases to employer national insurance contributions by accepting reduced profits or making efficiencies, rather than passing on lower wage rises to workers.

• Double funding | The UK will announce an additional £75mn for its Border Security Command in its plan to “smash” people-smuggling gangs. Yvette Cooper said the additional funding (bringing the total budget to £150mn) would be used for special investigators and new technology. “We are working very closely with Germany on how we substantially upgrade the actions on supply chains,” she told the BBC, adding that there would be an update on their joint work before Christmas.

• Soaring costs | Work to make England’s multistorey residential buildings safe from dangerous cladding could cost up to £22.4bn, the UK’s spending watchdog has revealed.

• Parker’s vision | West Midlands Labour mayor Richard Parker will become the first mayor to benefit next year from a “trailblazing devolution deal”. The former PwC partner tells the FT about his ambitions to reinvigorate the area and support the bankrupt Labour-run Birmingham city council.

• ‘Blind spot in No 10’ | Senior Labour MPs have expressed their frustration at the lack of Black representation in No 10 as the Conservatives elected Kemi Badenoch as their new leader, according to messages leaked to the Guardian’s Jessica Elgot and Rowena Mason. One senior Labour frontbencher said it was a “serious embarrassment and a blind spot in No 10” that there were no senior Black staff members at the centre of a Labour government.