Regardless of what she says, I don’t think there is a chance at all that Theresa May leads the Conservative Party into the next general election, regardless of when it is held. This conference will be an audition for whomever is going to be the next Prime Minister.
The Prime Minister is a fool to not have sacked Boris Johnson earlier. It shows exactly how weak and wounded she is after the debacle of the last election. Now, this party conference is going to be dominated by Boris coverage. Dump Boris ASAP, he’s not even particularly qualified to be Foreign Secretary and the UK needs someone who knows what they’re doing since the USA Secretary of State is incompetent and irrelevant.
Here’s just one example:
I expect the Tories will be uncomfortably silent on Brexit during this party conference. It’s been over a year and they still have no idea of what type of relationship they want the UK to have with the EU. This leaves the door open to someone like Jacob Rees Mogg, who has an awful plan for Brexit, but at least he has a plan.
The speeches from this party conference are all available on YouTube
Mrs May’s position isn’t good, but she probably remains the best person to play the weak hand which has been dealt, and sensible Tory MPs know that.
Boris is in an even worse position. His relevance and prospects are fading. He’s angling to be sacked now so that he can return to grandstanding on the back benches and hopefully sneak a win at the next Tory leadership election. Mrs May will wait until he does much more damage to the Tory government from inside the Cabinet before she let’s him take that course. She doesn’t come out worse if a leading Brexiteer sabotages the government. Boris’s window of opportunity to become Prime Minister would have been to leverage his popularity in London and media profile nationally to win over non-committed working class voters in the North. Unfortunately, his increasingly extreme anti-Europe stance will have damaged his support in London, and his long history of gaffes about working class Northerners means that this was always a long shot. He can return to his career as a pundit and television personality.
My guess is that when Boris does leave the Foreign Office, Mrs May will replace him with another prominent Brexiteer. Priti Patel would be a good choice - credible enough, and neatly keeping the Tory right on the hook for all the problems arising from Brexit, while getting a bonus advantage when it comes to arguing about the delivery of equality in practice with the old white men who have always run Labour.
And what other alternative leaders have the Tories actually got? Rudd, Hammond and Davis are all credible, but hardly any more exciting than May. Jacob Rees-Mogg would give Labour their best chance of a landslide in a generation, even under Jeremy Corbyn.
I’m not so sure. There don’t appear to be any right now, but it will only take one to stick their head above the parapet.
Spot on there.
I’m not so sure. Mogg is the sort of person who grows on you. A person who you respect rather than like. Kind of like Corbyn, really, except that Mogg has far more brains. Anyone who’s watched him will have seen his calmness under fire. Mogg could give the Tories a landslide given time. But I don’t think the Tories will take the risk. Not now, anyway. Another summer of Mogg-mentum might put him over the top.
It would be entertaining anyway, though I’m not sure that’s a good basis for running an election campaign.
I can see how someone who is informed and engaged and broadly of the right might find Rees-Mogg viable. I don’t think he would ever grow on me though. I say this as someone who has spent a lot of time trying and failing to persuade friends that Cameron and Osborne were reasonable and decent men, and not caricatures of Dickensian hard-heartedness. I don’t think I would even bother to try for someone who relishes his pose as the living embodiment of nineteenth century Toryism.
Pretending his name’s Mogg won’t persuade me he’s an authentic man of the people either.
Rees-Mogg fought his first parliamentary election in Central Fife, a constituency that once elected an actual Communist MP. He won over the common working folk* by going canvassing around the doors with his nanny. In a Bentley.
Narrator: He didn’t win over the common working folk
He appeals to a certain very old fashioned social climbing Tory type, but he’d be disastrous electorally on the national stage, I think. He also has social views - being a very strict Catholic - that’d do him no favours in places, and in age groups, that the Tories need gains in.
On the plus side, he is by all accounts extraordinarily kind and helpful to brand new MPs - from all parties - who may be a bit overwhelmed by the arcane rituals and procedures of Parliament. He’d make a better Speaker than PM.
He could well be, but Corbyn was supposed to be an electoral disaster on the national stage too.
This is a question of respect. He hasn’t tried to force his views on others, and while the Protestant / Catholic division may be strong in Northern Ireland, I think most Britons don’t care.
There seems to an embarrassing lack of talent in the Conservative party, the candidates for next PM seem to a blonde comedian and a motley crew of plotters and schemers.
The UK is going to go through a difficult patch dealing with the Brexit mess and it needs some decent political leadership.
I really don’t see where it going to come from in the Tory party. It is too divided.
The Tories have a knack of solidifying. They solidified behind May, for instance, until she proved herself an idiot and incompetent. Even Boris, to the extent of his abilities.
Mmm. Their knack for solidifying behind a leader is counterbalanced by their talent for tearing themselves apart over Europe. Eventually, the latter always wins out. The last three Tory Prime Ministers - Cameron, Major, Thatcher - all eventually came to grief over Europe-related issues, and May seems set to confirm that pattern.
