The ‘Evil Plotters’ WhatsApp group is a joke – but it could kill the Tory party

Kemi Badenoch, the business secretary and betting favourite to be the next Conservative leader, has been unmasked as a member of a WhatsApp group called “Evil Plotters”. This illustrates the danger in politics of a sense of humour: the news was reported by The Guardian as if it were an admission that she is both evil and a plotter.

It certainly seemed to contrast with her warning in a weekend TV interview against Tories “stirring” trouble with talk of her replacing Rishi Sunak. But it should take only a moment’s thought to realise that she was sincere in telling the BBC that people who put her name forward as an alternative leader were “not my friends”. She does not want to take over a few months before a likely election defeat.

The trouble is that she does want to be leader after the election, so calling the WhatsApp Group “Evil Plotters” isn’t wholly untrue. What is worth noting is that Michael Gove, the levelling up secretary, is another member of the group, despite what I am told was a genuine cooling in relations between Gove and Badenoch, after Gove, who is divorced, had an affair with an acquaintance of hers.

The name of the WhatsApp group is presumably an ironic reference to the plotting to which the Tories seem addicted, which, if not actually evil, is hardly helping the party as it approaches its rendezvous with the voters.

The really unhelpful plot, though, from Sunak’s point of view, is the attempt to oust him before the election. It is led by a small but growing cast of characters, who do not include Badenoch. The coup attempt was launched by David Frost, Boris Johnson’s Brexit negotiator, who organised a group of anonymous donors under the name “Conservative Britain Alliance” to pay for an opinion poll designed to persuade Tory MPs they must change leader or lose their seats.

He was joined by Sir Simon Clarke – the only Tory MP apart from Dame Andrea Jenkyns to call for Sunak to go – and then by Will Dry, a former polling adviser in Sunak’s No 10. The latest conspirator to be named is Dougie Smith, another recent No 10 adviser who is said to have taken part in discussions about the group’s plans. Smith, the husband of Munira Mirza, director of the No 10 policy unit under Johnson, was named by Nadine Dorries, Johnson’s culture secretary, as someone “working behind the scenes to remove Rishi”.

Dorries may not be the most reliable source – her book, The Plot, about the machinations to oust Johnson, is confused, to say the least – but The Times reports that Smith is an “adviser” to the group, although a source was quoted as saying that he “did not have a formal role”.

So far, the plot to get Sunak out before the general election is an unconvincing and almost comic melodrama. Not least because it is unclear who these plotters have in mind as the leader who would take over in the next few months and transform the party’s fortunes. Suella Braverman may think that she should be the beneficiary of the plotters’ manoeuvrings but it should be obvious that her fellow MPs would not put her on the leadership ballot paper, even if there were enough of them prepared to get rid of Sunak – which there aren’t.

The plotters don’t seem to have learned to count: they need at least 175 Tory MPs – half the parliamentary party – to support a change of leader. So far, two have declared publicly and the estimates I have seen of the numbers who support the Frost plot go no higher than 10. Yet Lord Frost and his band seem to imagine that a bad set of local election results in May, a few more headlines about immigration and the return of Nigel Farage to a leadership role in Reform UK will be enough to transform the situation.

This seems unlikely. But that does not mean that the plot is irrelevant. Apart from the immediate damage it does to the appearance of party unity, it is a harbinger of civil war to come for the Tory party after the election.

The plot reflects the deep ideological split in the party. It is a sign of how far down the slippery slope of Tory Corbynism the party has slid. The Tories seem to be entering a phase that is a mirror image of the Bennite and Corbynite splits in Labour.

The divide is not just over policy but over an attitude towards politics. The “true” socialists, like the “true” conservatives, care about ideological purity; compromise is a dirty word; and even obeying the law – in the Tory ultras’ case, international law – is secondary to achieving the ends.

The Lord Frost plotters and Badenoch’s “evil” plotters will find themselves on opposite sides of that split after the election. There may not be much of the Tory party left by the time of the election after that.