It’s another record for the British Conservative Party!
The Conservatives, or Tories as we call them, more or less affectionately according to our standpoint, have stolen another march on Labour, electing themselves as their leader and UK Prime Minister, a man of Indian extraction. The first one. You may like or dislike Rishi Sunak, but there’s no denying that it’s quite an achievement, in a country still not comfortable with multiculturalism (especially, ironically enough, among Tories).
Nor is it the first such march the Tories have stolen over Labour. They gave the country its first ever woman Prime Minister, in Margaret Thatcher. And then they twisted the knife by providing us with the second, Theresa May. And then really put the boot in by giving us the third, Liz Truss, though perhaps Conservatives won’t want to talk much about her.
A commentator I heard recently went still further, pointing out that the Conservatives gave Britain its first Jewish Prime Minister. First and only, so far. Benjamin Disraeli was technically Christian, but only by conversion. He was born Jewish.
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Some of the details, though, aren’t quite as honourable as the overall picture. I mean, take the case of Disraeli. The Conservative Party split over customs duties on imported grain, in 1846. A majority wanted to preserve the duties, but the minority included nearly all the leaders, in particular all those with ministerial experience. The other lot may have been larger, but it was desperately short of men of talent or proven track record.
Disraeli was one of the few who stood out from the crowd. He was an excellent speaker, a hard worker, a man who mastered his subject and out-debated most of his opponents. And yet, and yet, when the party needed a leader in the House of Commons – the overall leader, Lord Stanley, later to be known as the Earl of Derby, was in the House of Lords – Disraeli was passed over for appointment.
Not once. Not twice. Three times.
And even then, Stanley decided to hand the role of Commons leader, usually held by one man, to a committee. Disraeli would be just one of three members, alongside two nonentities.
It would take three years before the committee fell apart and Disraeli finally won the appointment for himself. And then another seventeen, ending with the death of Derby, before he won the overall leadership of the party and became Prime Minister himself. The Tories gave Britain its first ever Jewish Prime Minister, but not with what you might call enthusiasm.
Even Maggie Thatcher wasn’t exactly a shoo-in. She stood for the Conservative leadership following a general election defeat for the incumbent leader and Prime Minister, Edward Heath – his third defeat out of the four elections he fought. Many of his fellow Conservative MPs were fed up with his record, but there was no obvious successor, so most expected him to be re-elected leader despite his defeats. Most of the Conservative-leaning press backed him as, according to polls, did the members of the party around the country.
Thatcher’s campaign was brilliantly managed by her fellow Tory MP Airey Neave.
She was little known, an Education Secretary who’d hardly covered herself in glory in the post and had little to qualify her for the top job. What Neave did was talk to groups of disaffected MPs who really had no time for Heath anymore, and suggest that, even if they weren’t keen on Thatcher, they should vote for her to force Heath out and precipitate a second ballot in which they could choose a candidate they really wanted.
That worked. She beat Heath, not by enough votes to be elected at once, but enough to force Heath out and trigger a second ballot, which several other candidates then joined. The front runner was a party heavyweight, Willie Whitelaw. Many expected him to walk the election, but many had expected Heath to walk the previous one.
What had happened in between was that Thatcher had picked up momentum. Now that she’d beaten Heath, Airey Neave could go back to the MPs he’d canvassed before, but this time to say that she was no longer a rank outsider, only up to collecting protest votes. Now she was looking like a winner.
And win she did. The rest is history. The history of a woman who’s a saint for some, something else for others. The first woman in the post.
Again, though, it wasn’t a pushover. It took effort. It took some clever footwork, under the direction of a fine campaign strategist.
Even Sunak’s arrival in the top job wasn’t straightforward. It took him two bites at the cherry. He had a go in the summer but was cheated of the prize when the Tory Party membership chose Liz Truss in preference to him. There are suspicions that, though solidly right wing himself, he wasn’t quite right wing enough to satisfy the appetite for raw flesh of an electorate – Conservative Party members – that likes to think of itself as one of the most sophisticated in the world but is in reality just one of the most reactionary.
Of course, there’s also a suspicion that these characters preferred Truss for her rather lighter skin colour than Sunak’s.
It turned out to be a disastrous decision. Truss tanked the economy in a matter of days. She had to go, and this time the Parliamentary Conservative Party managed to arrange things so that the members around the country wouldn’t get another chance to spoil the show. Sunak was the only candidate backed by his fellow MPs, and was therefore elected unopposed. He was in, but at his second time of asking.
Truss did at least give the Tories another record. Previously, the shortest tenure of any British Prime Minister had been that of George Canning in the late 1820s, who clocked up just 119 days. But he died in office. His immediate successor, Viscount Goderich, set the record for the shortest tenure of a Prime Minister who survived his term. He hated being Prime Minister, and wept when he went to see the king to stand down, or to be dismissed as he surely would have been had he not resigned. The king had to offer him a handkerchief to dry his tears.
Goderich managed 144 days.
Truss didn’t just beat those two, she crushed their records, lasting just just 50 days as Prime Minister.
Ah, well. It seems the Conservatives are at least good at setting records (both Canning and Goderich were Tories too, by the way). And it also seems that the records aren’t always quite as commendable as they appear at first sight. Still, they represent significant achievements.
Let’s hope Labour can start to emulate them soon. Maybe the current leader, Keir Starmer, could hand over to a woman or to someone from an ethnic minority after his own long, successful term in office.
That would be fine new record to admire. And just great for the country.
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