It sounds mad, but could ditching Sunak and rallying behind a new leader help save the Tory party?

In the past week, Rishi Sunak has suffered the defection of Lee Anderson, a donor race row and, inevitably, yet more speculation about his leadership. He’s ruled out an election on 2 May, declaring that economic and political recoveries are “around the corner” and urging nervous colleagues to “stick to the plan”.

He is sticking to his public working assumption of an election in the second half of the year. That means getting through the summer, finally making the Rwanda plan effective, “stopping the boats”, and voters benefiting from more tax cuts, lower inflation and lower interest rates in the autumn. But even some in No 10 fear that the present situation is unsustainable.

Sunak says “all Conservatives are united in wanting to deliver a brighter future” for Britain, which is arguable; and that he’s “not interested in Westminster politics”, which would be highly unusual for a man in his line of work. The impression is growing of a man who is losing control of events and of his own party, his authority seeping away, his own future passing out of his hands. No surprise, then, that there’s a bit of plotting going on...

It sounds mad, but it might help, and it could be time for a calculated gamble.

Assuming it’s a coronation rather than a contest, and there’s immediate unity and harmony in support of the new leader, it might give the party something of a lift in the polls. New leaders often do, at least before the tough decisions and miseries of office catch up with them. Sunak was popular once. So was Boris Johnson.

It all depends, though. One of the things the public dislike about the Conservatives is that they are so divided. If a new leader managed to unify them on shared values and detailed policies, that might neutralise quite a big negative – but none of the previous incumbents since the early phase of David Cameron’s time in office have been able to achieve that comity on a long-term basis, and the public can see that all too well.

Getting Brexit done was supposed to have removed one major source of acrimony, but the Tory addiction to plotting, ideology and factionalism has, if anything, worsened since 2019.

That’s pretty much unthinkable at this stage in the electoral cycle. It would make them look absurdly out of touch with the voters, and incorrigibly divided. Further, a choice made by the membership would result in the selection of the most extreme of the two candidates presented to them by MPs – a repeat of the Liz Truss experience.

The process would take weeks if not months, and would be a dreadful distraction. There would be nothing left to lead at the end of it. So they probably won’t indulge themselves in that way. If they decided to do so, then most of the party’s MPs may as well start looking for jobs in lobbying immediately.

A coronation, engineered by the cabinet and/or the 1922 Committee of backbenchers, would be far preferable to a divisive contest. If the will were there, it could be pulled off rapidly.

She does know a lot about coronations. However, she can’t win the Tories a fifth term, because not even a combination of Winston Churchill and John the Baptist could do that. On the other hand, if she’s the beneficiary of a bloodless coup, is allowed to lead, moves the party to the centre, and doesn’t find herself instantly attacked by the “five families” and other gangs, then she might just nudge the party up in the polls and save enough seats to avoid the next election turning into an extinction-level event.

The risk now is that sticking with Sunak would leave the party so feeble that it is taken over by Nigel Farage and Reform UK – meaning that it then dies the death of populist extremism, leaving Labour in charge for a decade plus.

The membership is old and cranky, the base in local government badly denuded, it’s overly reliant on a few mega-rich donors, and it’s about to be demolished at the general election. The deep damage caused by the Brexit referendum and its aftermath has been disguised by the 2019 election win.

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The fact that a heavy defeat is inevitable doesn’t mean that the scale of that collapse is irrelevant – survival, and having something to build on, is what is at stake now. Thus far, the signs are that the right of the party wouldn’t allow Mordaunt as prime minister to run the “social” side of policy, because she’s not regarded as sound on transgender issues. So her leadership might be even weaker than Sunak’s, through no fault of her own. In many respects, the party is unleadable.

For one reason or another, they are either ineligible to stand (Johnson) or would be even worse than Sunak because they’d shift the party to the right. None of these figures, despite the myths and the propaganda, are obviously appealing to the general public, despite Johnson’s untenable past successes.

Badenoch and Braverman have their strengths, but they are abrasive personalities who sound alarmingly extreme; they’d split the party and be a gift to Labour, even assuming they got elected in the first place. They are not what George Osborne once self-deprecatingly called “retail politicians”. Johnson carries well-known reputational baggage of a different but equally repulsive kind. The Johnson victories of 2016 and 2019 feel distant indeed now.

The May local elections will be the moment of maximum danger for Sunak. So far he has “only” been plagued by disastrously bad opinion-poll results, and by the abject failure of successive “set piece” events (Budgets, conferences) to restore his and his party’s fortunes; 2 May 2024 will be about “real votes in real ballot boxes”.

This year’s local elections will be a bumper crop, comprising those seats and some mayoralties that last came up for election in 2021, including a whole extra crop that were deferred from 2020 to 2021 because of the pandemic. Thus they will represent an exceptionally wide sample of public opinion, at least in England (there are no local government elections in Scotland or Wales).

The Tories will most likely lose more than half of their councillors, and suffer severe setbacks in the London and Teesside mayoralties.

Even though 2021 was a good year for the party, if 2024 proves catastrophic then Sunak’s position may simply be untenable, and he might even quit voluntarily.

If he didn’t quit immediately, forcing a by-election that the Conservatives might not manage to win, he’d hang around on a fairly low-key basis until the general election – which is, of course, not far off in any case. A knighthood and/or a peerage is his by convention, and he can start a new career in business in California, where he has a home.

Not many former senior British politicians pursue a career in business beyond directorships on the boards of companies they privatised or awarded large contracts to during their official career. Sunak has the background, ambition and, especially via his wife, the resources to make what they call “serious money”.

It’s not realistically possible for any Tory leader to win the next election; it is all a question of limiting the losses. Upon that the very future existence of the party rests. As has been observed more frequently of the Labour Party in the past, the Conservative Party doesn’t have a divine right to exist, let alone to govern.

An inspirational new prime minister might be able to inject enough energy and new ideas to rejuvenate things, and even to begin to reverse the seemingly inexorable slide into oblivion. A tilt to the moderate centre would also help. Or, like Truss before them, they might actually make matters even worse.

Leadership chatter does tend to make the Conservatives look desperate, in any case; which of course they are, and with good reason.