A tale of two political post-mortems

The latest outbreak of hostilities among Tory leadership hopefuls is entertaining in its gloves-off ferocity, but a disaster for the party. 

It hardly needs saying that for democracy to function we need a strong opposition to hold the government to account, and even more so when that government has as many seats as Keir Starmer’s triumphant Labour Party.

The grace and goodwill of Rishi Sunak’s speech in defeat, where he praised the incoming prime minister, suggested that politics could be conducted civilly. But the subsequent behaviour of some of his former cabinet ministers demolished that naïve notion. 

Most trenchant has been Suella Braverman, who (hard to believe given her current form) was once Sunak’s Home Secretary but now blames him for delivering the party’s ‘greatest defeat’ and says he shouldn’t have been PM in the first place.

‘It was members who chose an election-winning prime minister in the form of Boris Johnson that led us to our success in 2019,’ she told the Popular Conservatives conference on Tuesday, appealing to Tory grassroots in her blatant bid for power.

Braverman has always seemed to misjudge how her tone, if not her words and actions, plays with the public. But her former colleague and rival, Kemi Badenoch, was quick to put her in her place.

Braverman, said Badenoch, appeared to be having a ‘very public’ nervous breakdown, to which Braverman hit back: ‘What Kemi says about me says something about her too.’

Conservative MPs may well be traumatised by the scale of their defeat, as Badenoch said during the first meeting of the shadow cabinet this week, but they simply cannot carry on with these tit-for-tat spats if they want to rebuild.

Badenoch also does herself no favours by openly attacking her leader – both over his decision to call an early election without informing his cabinet, which she said bordered on being unconstitutional, and his ‘disastrous’ D-Day gaffe, when he returned early from the commemorations.

The greatest – perhaps the only – voice of sanity in the party has come from Andy Street, who was the first mayor of the West Midlands.

Warning that Conservatives were in ‘terrible danger’ as they tried to regain support lost to Reform, he urged them back to the centre.

Adopting a ‘Reform light’ agenda would be ‘very, very foolish’ and condemn the party to a long period in the wilderness.

‘The main issue is that we lost enormous ground to the Lib Dems and in many seats directly to Labour as well,’ he said, adding that ‘the party’s next leader needed to be someone who could broaden its appeal’, which would rule out both Badenoch, seen as the frontrunner in the leadership contest, and Braverman.

Vituperative as it is, the Tory infighting is given a good run for its money by recriminations north of the border.

The other big loser on July 4 was, of course, the SNP, down from 48 to nine seats, and it didn’t take long for Scottish Nationalists to start tearing each other apart.

The defeated MP for Edinburgh South West, Joanna Cherry, hit out at Nicola Sturgeon while the former First Minister watched from her pundit’s seat on live TV on election night.

She castigated Sturgeon and Ian Blackford, who was the SNP’s Westminster leader until 2022, for a ‘style of leadership that didn’t broker discussion, debate or argument’.

Later, Cherry, long at odds with Sturgeon, particularly over gender ideology, said she was ‘dismayed’ to hear her talking about the SNP in the third person, ‘not taking any responsibility for what is happening to the party now’.

Even more vicious have been attacks from Scot Nat veteran Jim Sillars, a former SNP deputy leader. He branded Sturgeon ‘Stalin’s wee sister’ who ran a ‘leadership cult’, as he called on SNP members to ’take back the power of the party’.

‘July was inevitable given how the Sturgeon/Swinney era misled the movement, lost its common sense in government, promoted marginal issues as national priorities while the real priorities of the people such as education, housing, NHS, infrastructure, were notable only for the staggering level of incompetence with which they were dealt with,’ said Sillars in an open letter to the membership.

Another ousted MP, Alyn Smith, has slammed his party for being ‘out of touch’ and ‘self-indulgent’, while Sturgeon’s predecessor, Alex Salmond, is on the warpath again, accusing the party of squandering his legacy.

With John Swinney’s future as leader surely now in doubt, and Sturgeon waiting, along with the rest of Scotland, to see if she will be charged with embezzlement in connection with a missing £600,000 from party funds, as her husband and former SNP chief executive Peter Murrell has been, how do the Nationalists begin to recover?

With the greatest of difficulty, one hopes, or, even better, not at all. While it is in everyone in Britain’s interests that the Conservatives recalibrate to keep the Labour government in check, it is in everyone’s interests, even Nationalists (though they’d never admit it), that the single-issue SNP self-destructs.

Imagine a Scotland free from grievance seeking, free from navel gazing, free from the threat of independence, and therefore free to focus on more pressing matters. That would be a result worth celebrating.

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