If Sunak falls, beware the rise of Tory Corbynism

David Frost, the Brexit negotiator and Conservative peer, has “leadership ambitions”, we are told. According to The Times he is in the top tier of the party’s approved candidates list, allowing him to apply for a safe seat, giving up his peerage for the prospect of becoming leader of the opposition in the Commons after the election.

Reader, I scoffed. But then I remembered that the last time I scoffed so hard was when it was suggested that Jeremy Corbyn might become leader of the Labour Party. So let us pause to take stock.

If the Tories lose the election, they ought in theory to have a chance of bouncing back quickly. Labour will inherit an economy in difficulties, the public finances in a parlous state and the NHS on a trolley. Keir Starmer may have a small or no majority. If the Tories stay disciplined and stick with Rishi Sunak as their leader, they could hope to exploit the disappointed expectations of a Labour government within a few years. But they won’t.

Everything we know about the psychology of defeat tells us that the Tories will retreat into recrimination and magical thinking. The signs are already there. By choosing Liz Truss last year, the party members have already gone on one holiday from reality – a phrase deployed not by an outside commentator but by Michael Gove, deputy leader of the Leave campaign.

Conservative MPs were able to rescue the situation, but they could not cure the fever. Some Tory members, to be fair, realised that they had made a mistake, but most responded to the real-world experiment of blowing up fiscal responsibility by arguing that it simply hadn’t been done right. It had been done too quickly; the ground hadn’t been prepared; it was sabotaged by the establishment.

The battlefield of the Tory civil war is populated not only by the followers of one failed leader but of two. Boris Johnson tried to bring the temple down on his way out – like a low-rent Samson he managed only to take a bit of plaster off the walls, but he still left a trail of bitterness behind.

Zac Goldsmith’s resignation as a junior environment minister may not shift that many votes. Most of those who take a fundamentalist view of green issues already agree with Goldsmith that Sunak is “uninterested” in the environment. But it adds to the exodus from the big tent of Johnsonian Toryism.

Just as Labour went from the big tent of Blairism to its takeover by what was in effect a separate party, the Tories have gone from the inclusive liberalism of David Cameron, via the inclusive Euroscepticism of Johnson, to a number of sects competing for the rights to the Tory franchise.

It is striking, for example, how the list of contributors to a new book edited by David Gauke, The Case for the Centre Right, reads like a roll call of an alternative Tory party: Rory Stewart, Michael Heseltine, Dominic Grieve, Daniel Finkelstein, Gavin Barwell, Amber Rudd, Andrew Cooper, Anne Milton, Sam Gyimah and Tim Pitt. It would be a Tory party so centrist that it overlaps with the Liberal Democrats (Sam Gyimah) and even with Keir Starmer’s office (to which Cooper is an adviser).

They look like the Tory party’s equivalent of the Blairites, left behind by their party’s long march towards ideological purity. For a while after the Brexit rupture, Johnson was able to hold together what was left of the party by facing both ways on every important issue. He was a pro-immigration Brexiteer, a big-spending small-stater, a low-tax high-taxer and a green smokestack red waller. But after an election defeat, the party will try to choose.

Thus it could be that Truss was a mere gateway leader: a Tory Ed Miliband opening the way for a Tory Corbyn who will emerge from the commentariat’s blind side to offer the full-strength, unapologetic version of the true message. Hence Lord Frost.

There are several problems with this scenario, and I think they are more substantial than the reasons for thinking that Corbyn could never win in a field as weak as Andy Burnham, Yvette Cooper and Liz Kendall.

The first is that MPs play a more important role as gatekeepers under the Tory party’s rules than they used to in Labour. Corbyn needed 35 nominations to get on the ballot paper; a Tory candidate needs one-third of the party’s MPs to make it to the final two, for whom the members vote.

Katy Balls, the Spectator’s political editor who reported Lord Frost’s leadership ambition (and its denial by “those close” to him), suggests that he might have a chance if the Tories lose badly, ending up with fewer than 200 seats. But Prof Tim Bale and David Jeffery have shown that the factional balance of the parliamentary Tory party would hardly change, no matter how badly the party does.

I don’t think Frost is a likely leader, mainly because it is hard to become a contender as a new MP, but I think it likely that the membership will be gripped by some form of Tory Corbynism. The leadership question will then turn on which of the candidates acceptable to MPs – Kemi Badenoch and Penny Mordaunt are the current betting favourites, albeit at low probabilities – can better tell the members what they want to hear. In other words, who is the Tories’ Keir Starmer?