Be positive – the Tories would be wise to heed Boris’s advice
'I had to choose between honest arrogance and hypocritical humility," the architect Frank Lloyd Wright once said. "I chose the former, and have seen no reason to change."
James Cleverly likes a bit of honest arrogance – he honestly believes he is the best candidate to lead the Tories. He tells people regularly, irritating some.
The former cabinet minister has some data to lean on. After his address at the party's conference last week, Cleverly saw the biggest, positive move on the betting exchanges – the odds shortening on his chances of success from 10-1 to 7-2.
Some 40 per cent of all bets placed on the day of the four leadership hopefuls' speeches were for the MP for Braintree. He is now second favourite to be the next Conservative leader behind Robert Jenrick.
This week Tory MPs will whittle down the remaining candidates to two, who will be put before the party membership. They will make the final decision on who will lead them against a Labour government which is running out of feet to shoot itself in – the resignation of chief-of-staff Sue Gray just being the latest.
With such a small electorate (there are just 121 Conservative MPs left licking their wounds) predicting how the final votes will fall is a game for mugs. If five MPs had changed sides in 2022, Penny Mordaunt would have fought Rishi Sunak to become prime minister and Liz Truss would not now be on the world lecture circuit. How different the trajectory would have been for the Tories if the sword carrier had made it to No 10. Politics is the stuff of slender margins.
All that can be said with any certainty is that Cleverly has momentum. His speech was witty, policy light (Margaret Thatcher's first election manifesto ran to just 32 pages), said sorry, and was largely optimistic about the future of his party and the country.
He referenced Ronald Reagan's "It's Morning Again in America", Barack Obama's "Yes We Can" and Gordon Brown's "It's no time for a novice" (against the then leadership upstart David Miliband) to good effect. In contrast with the other three, Cleverly has run two of the great offices of state and the party as chairman.
Blessedly, culture wars and ugly nativism hardly got a look in.
Cleverly also, drum roll, spoke behind a lectern and looked a little like a prime minister might look. David Cameron spoke famously without notes or lectern in 2005, but neither Jenrick, Kemi Badenoch, or Tom Tugendhat achieved the same effect, awkwardly striding around the stage without the leadership charisma necessary to pull it off.
Their advisers should have remembered Ed Miliband in 2014 who, trying to grasp the Cameron effect, stumbled unsuccessfully, forgot large chunks of his conference speech and thereby revealed how unready to be prime minister he actually was.
At a dinner at the Tory conference, one guest asked if anyone could remember what Cameron had actually argued for in 2005. It was the right question. Though easy to forget, 2005 was more about what Cameron said, not how he said it. He wanted people to "feel good about being Conservatives again, I want to switch on a whole new generation". He spoke of hope over fear, of personal responsibility and a smaller state, but not a smaller state that left the "weak and defenceless behind".
Cameron won in 2010 and again in 2015. Boris Johnson won in 2019 with a similar message that was a positive, Big Tent coalition offer, "getting Brexit done" being a way to move on which an exhausted electorate embraced. Time and again voters have plumped for modernising leaders.
"Reform was on about zero per cent when I was prime minister," Johnson said in his interview with my colleague Gordon Rayner.
"Because the thing that was being unleashed was people's confidence that they can make life better for themselves and their family. And it was happening."
Johnson is right about no deals with Reform. A grouping together of supporters motivated by a better future for Britain is the only route to power for the Conservatives. It is not about centrism – it is about pragmatic, competent leadership, supporting the private sector to boost economic growth, reducing state interference without leaving public services cratered and having a confident outward attitude to the world which leverages Britain's rightful claim to be the West's diplomatic leader – less self-interested than America and less obdurate than France.
In his interview with Camilla Tominey on GB News, Johnson said of a possible pact with Reform: "Don't big up your opponents." He said that under Sunak, the Conservatives appeared to be "alternately machine-gunning both sides of our coalition".
Johnson is mistaken on many things, too desperate to be liked by the person sitting in front of him (leading to the disease of "yes"ism) and dissembles when in a tight spot. But if Tories take one thing from the interviews he has done to mark the publication of his book, Unleashed, it should be this – be proud of being Conservatives because that is the name above the door.
This is even more true as Labour reveals with every passing day its governing naivety. This weekend Bridget Phillipson, now the Secretary of State for Education with a duty to govern for all, tweeted "our state schools need teachers more than private schools need embossed stationery" and "our children need mental health support more than private schools need new pools", forgetting that scrapping in Opposition is not the same as running the country.
On Friday the Secretary of State for Transport, Louise Haigh, ordered that an advertising hoarding at a station in London should be switched off because passengers had complained – an issue that should be so far down a Cabinet minister's list of priorities as to be invisible. This week Labour will announce its workers' rights package, just as businesses are going cold on the new government's inability to frame its story on wealth creation and growth rather than by business meddling, one advertising hoarding at a time.
The Government's collapse in the eyes of the public helps the Tory case. Cleverly is correct that they need to show they have learnt the lessons of the last election, but Keir Starmer is no Tony Blair and 2024 is not 1997 . A way back is becoming clearer.
In a neat summation of the ideal Conservative offer, Stephen Harper, the former Canadian prime minister, spoke of the "six-pack and the country club", code applied here for bringing together the hard-working left behind voter and the shire Tory. Harper used to lead a party called Reform, blew up the Right-wing consensus in his country and led the Conservatives back to power. It is possible.
