Where Angels Fear to Tread

Well, it’s a more original Forster pun than Howard’s End
Death offers some small decencies, not least that no one really wants to look too closely at it. So no one’s going to jump up and down about the fact that the Lib Dems knew they had a mortally ill candidate standing for parliament. Our irrelevant sympathy for the fact that the Lib Dem challenger has sadly died in Staffordshire South masks general indifference. This is a safe enough Tory seat, and its incumbent, Sir Patrick Cormack, is one of the least amusingly pompous men in the House of Commons. Indeed, for the black-hearted amongst you, the fact that this ‘arch-constitutionalist’ has lost his unbroken tenure in parliament means that he has no longer is ’35 years up’ as far as one day eventually being father of the house is concerned. He, I’m at least amused to say, goes straight back to zero on that score, even assuming he is elected. For under fairly recent constitutional changes, we are now in the absurd position that when a candidate dies after close of nominations, but before polling day, the entire contest is set aside, and is run as an immediate bye election, four weeks after the new house sits (11th May in this instance). This is yet another dreadful development of our increasingly tufted parliamentary democracy, but the bye election is set to have a far bigger role than anyone could have reasonably foreseen. For it’s likely, I thus far uniquely predict, to mark the death knell for any pretensions Michael Howard has to cling on as Tory leader.

Here’s how it’s going to happen. The general election result for the Tories is going to be phenomenally bad. Really quite atrociously awful. At this stage, after what has been the worst general election campaign in more than 20 years, nothing short of a miracle (of weirdly inexplicable results stemming from bizarre regional differentials in turnout) can stop Labour from being re-elected with their third successive ‘ton’. Michael Howard is going to want to stay. This for a few hours for his own sake at rate, and then increasingly merely because his friends want him to stay for their own sakes. His friends include David Cameron and George Osborne, who are going to very soon be very grateful that the parliamentary Tory party is not in fact an unnamed island, and they are thus not being steadily driven with horns and shouts towards a sudden, cliff-top centric exit. Self-preservation will explain why people like this mum lines like, ‘we have to avoid the mess William/John/Goschen [delete according to preference] left us in. Michael owes it to the party to see us through to next year at least’. This response constitutes blind panic. And therefore leading it will be the Corporal Jones of the modern Conservative party, David Maclean. In his last act as Chief Whip, David Maclean is already orchestrating ‘the colleagues’ who’ll obediently trot in front of the cameras to spout this line as well. Nameless and numberless, and rather less in number come Friday morning than they were on Thursday afternoon, this scheme, like all the rest of David Maclean’s, bar his coup, won’t work.

The other bunch of people who’ll want Michael Howard to cling on until at least the winter are, those who have ambitions, but lack the surname Davis. Their calculation being, ‘we have to get rid of the mass membership’. Actually, that part of the project is moderately more medium term (though already well under way). What they in fact want to do is merely get rid of the membership’s determining say in who the Tory leader is. The solitary way they or anyone else can see of getting this done is if a lameduck leader, who has nothing therefore to lose viz the activists’ wrath, uses what ebbing authority he has as leader to compel the Board and National Convention to change the leadership rules. This has to be done, if your initials aren’t “DD”, because of course the current leadership election rules will allow the most right wing man left standing to win, against anyone. Which isn’t good news if your surname is Rifkind, Clarke, Yeo, still less if it’s Cameron, Osborne or, still more laughably, May. But that awaits both the sense of crisis the weekend will assuredly bring, and the small but crucial matter of whether Davis has it in him to do what Howard had done to Duncan Smith. In a foliage-related dromedarial spine snapping moment, Liam Fox publicly musing on how likely it was Davis would hold his seat has seen the hounds unleashed.

If Davis holds his seat, there will be a leadership election very soon, there already being all the, how shall I put this, ‘incentives’ in place for there to be one. And if Davis loses, well as I think his own, confident estimate, is likely enough, that means we’re discussing improbable territory where it’s more than possible that all of May, Letwin and Howard himself will have lost their seats too. Tokenism will probably do for Theresa May in the future what it has done for her in the recent past, and Olive by all accounts is going to leave the shadow cabinet anyway. Come seat or not, Rothschild’s are a-calling. But I’m assuming that both Howard and Davis will hold on, and that, in suitably truncated form, a voiceless version of Granita, but-with-a-happy-ending will occur: Davis, like Gordon, wilted when the ball was tossed in his general direction in 2003; like Rab, if he does so again, he knows he’s finished.

So how does South Staffs come into that? Very simple. After an unprecedented, shattering defeat, the morale of both the Tory party and its sometime voters will be spent. Patrick Cormack, moreover, is just about the worst possible candidate any party could nightmare into existence for the close scrutiny of a bye election campaign. To make things even worse, South Staffs was a strong UKIP area in 2004, and Cormack represents old school Try Europhilia. So I make this foolishly precise prediction: should Howard attempt to resort to trench warfare, and try to hold off a Davis-inspired attack, it’ll be the result in South Staffs that does for him, and in short order too. UKIP are more than capable of turning this into a referendum on the Tory leader, they’ll be egged onto doing this by the national press, and were I bravely angelic, I think I’d even predict, if they pick the right man, they’ll get their first MP.

For the duration of the campaign, the Social Affairs Unit will be publishing regular commentaries on the progress of the UK election. These commentaries represent the views of the anonymous commentator, not those of the Social Affairs Unit, its Trustees, Advisors or Director.