Culture war defines a very contemporary Tory leadership contest
One of the most striking features of the Tory leadership contest, apart from the obvious diversity of the candidates, is the unfamiliar ground on which it is being fought.
Sure enough, it kicked off on tax – to cut or not to cut – with the candidates mostly trying to distance themselves from front runner Rishi Sunak who, as Chancellor, raised taxes to “socialist” levels, according to Jacob Rees-Mogg.
But as the Tory leadership contest has intensified, culture, or rather the culture war, has become increasingly central to the competition and, at this point in proceedings, looks like it could be the decider.
Even before Penny Mordaunt – in second place for the Tory leadership at the time of writing – gained momentum, rising Conservative star Kemi Badenoch launched her campaign with an unambiguous war on woke.
A darling of the right, Badenoch has made it her mission to take on cancel culture, defend free speech and, something she seems obsessed with, banish gender-neutral toilets.
Her plain speaking has won her new fans within her party but after the first round of votes saw Mordaunt suddenly in the ascendancy, it was the cultural differences between the candidates that started to define the leadership clash.
Mordaunt, following her strong showing in Thursday’s ballot in the Tory leadership contest, now finds herself the target of right-wing attacks, some but not all (the unelected David Frost trashed her Brexit preparations) focused on her alleged wokery.
In particular, her past pronouncements on transgender issues, when she was women and equalities minister, have made her suspect in the eyes of some colleagues and with the sisterhood in the media.
Her biggest crime was to say “trans men are men, trans women are women” during a consultation on reforming the Gender Recognition Act.
She also stands accused of supporting self-identification for trans people and saying things like “people assigned female at birth” rather than using the word “woman”.
Since being catapulted into the limelight as a potential prime minister, though, she has sought to clarify her position on trans matters, making a distinction between legal and biological definitions.
“I support women-only spaces,’ she said on LBC this week. ‘I don’t want any rowing back of women’s rights.”
Former cheerleaders, such as Pink News, the voice of trans activists, said she was “once seen as a rare LGBTQ+ ally within the parliamentary Conservative Party” but now had betrayed the community.
But apparently even this cold-shouldering is not enough to restore her credentials for the premiership among her detractors. She is still the “woke” one and if predictions are correct and she makes it to the final three, most likely with Sunak and Liz Truss, we can expect her cultural fluidity to be her Achilles’ heel.
From a feminist’s point of view, I would argue that she is, in fact, a good bet for the Tory leadership. Scottish Conservative MPs like her – John Lamont, the MP for Berwickshire, Roxburgh and Selkirk, are part of her campaign team – because they can see how effective she would be against the Nationalists.
Boris Johnson was a massive electoral asset for Nicola Sturgeon, but Mordaunt would be far too sympathetic. Scottish voters, women especially, might prefer her to the irreparably woke Sturgeon who has introduced gender recognition legislation and remains a pin-up (not literally) for Pink News.
Mordaunt would also present Labour with a challenge. One female commentator said last week she wouldn’t be voting Conservative in future if PM were PM but surely, for women, voting for Keir Starmer would be worse.
The Labour leader can’t even explain what a woman is and his frontbenchers struggle when asked for their opinions on gender politics.
Compare, say, Shadow Home Secretary Yvette Cooper’s “I’m not going to get into rabbit holes on this” to the frank discussions going on in the Tory echelons this week.
Even if it gets uglier, and it surely will, at least the runners and riders in this leadership fight are engaging in the cultural debate, which has to be better than hoping it will go away.
Whoever wins in the race to the Tory leadership, they will be in their forties and representative of a younger generation. Unless there is a big surprise, the next Tory leader will not be a middle-aged white male.
The party, and the country, need a breath of fresh air after the past few years. There is a baton being passed here, from the values of the Boomers, from those who treasure the memory of Dad’s Army and It Ain’t Half Hot Mum, to those reared in more enlightened times.
Mordaunt is also being undermined by the Tory grandees for scorning the classic sitcoms of yesteryear but how far back do her critics wish to go in harnessing “the past” as proof of a candidate’s conservative bona fides?
We can be nostalgic for the olden days but still move on; it’s called progress.