Back in 2019, Conservative Party members were asked to vote for a new leader following Theresa May’s resignation. She resigned because she failed three times to accept her Brexit deal, so her position became untenable. She did everything in her power, but as a politician who fought to stay in the European Union, trying to get a Brexit deal through parliament was always going to be a tall order.
But why was the pro-Remain Mrs May elected Prime Minister in the first place, and who put her there? Enter the Conservative Parliamentary Party, the same crowd that are telling us today that we need a new leader and that Boris Johnson must go.
After the resignation of any Conservative Party leader, the process of choosing a replacement involves MPs in a secret ballot fighting each other for their various favorite candidates. Ultimately, the final two candidates go to a runoff, in which Conservative members choose a winner. This happened between Boris Johnson and Jeremy Hunt in 2019, when Boris won roughly 64 per cent of the vote, a clear winner and elected leader by members.
Three years later, however, the parliamentary party bypassed members’ votes by constructively replacing the leader. In my view, this means that they colluded among themselves to get rid of Boris Johnson without consulting anyone else. Boris’s mandate – not only winning the leadership election but an eighty seat majority (not to mention the Brexit referendum) – was completely ignored by a small number of MPs. This is undemocratic and unacceptable to members of the Conservative Party. This made them very angry. Including me!
That’s why I decided to act and sponsored a campaign to add Boris Johnson to a separate ballot before the final runoff for a new party leader. It would be a simple yes/no vote by Conservative members on whether to accept Boris Johnson’s resignation. If members accept his resignation, so be it, and then they can decide who they want as their new leader in the coming weeks. But if members do not accept his resignation, he remains prime minister. Members will have had their say and we can all move on.
The chairman of the committee since 1922, Sir Graham Brady, argued that voting for Boris was against the rules because a resigning leader could not take part in the next leadership campaign. But this is disingenuous because the members do not want Boris to participate in the leadership campaign, we want a vote on whether the members should accept his resignation. Also, this is not a matter for a 1922 committee. It is a matter for the Conservative Party Board, and under Article 17 of its constitution, the Board is free to do what is in the best interests of the Conservative Party and its members. Sir Graham Brady as a board member should know this.
We should not underestimate the utter outrage among members who have sent thousands of emails to the Conservative Party chairman demanding Boris be elected. It cannot be in the best interest of the party to ignore its members and nullify their previous votes. If I were Liz Truss or Rishi Sunak, I would see the leadership at this stage as a poisoned chalice, a pyrrhic victory that could lead to anger and division in the Conservative Party and leave us in the political wilderness for a generation.
And all because Boris Johnson was ultimately ousted by around 50 MPs who, through a herd mentality of a series of resignations, managed to oust our Prime Minister in a time of crisis, despite his record of winning millions of votes and without the official approval of party members. What a shower.
Lord Cruddas is a former Treasurer of the Conservative Party
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