‘He has no enemies’: Is Oliver Dowden the secret prime minister in waiting?

Oliver Dowden, the deputy prime minister, has sharpened up his act. He was notably punchier when he stood in for Rishi Sunak at Prime Minister’s Questions on Wednesday. In a recent round of Sunday TV interviews he has been crisper and more fluent than his previous diffident self.

Some in Westminster have been asking if he sees himself as a possible successor to Sunak. That doesn’t seem likely if the Conservatives lose the next election, in which case party members can be expected to go on another holiday from reality. They will be looking for the candidate who can most ferociously vilify the party’s “betrayal” by the managerial centrists Sunak, Hunt and Dowden.

But if the Conservatives defy expectations and stay in power, he could easily emerge as the natural choice. His ambition has long been well concealed behind the mask of effective backroom operator. When I raised the matter with a friend of his, they said that it had genuinely never occurred to them that Dowden might see himself that way – but added that “thinking about it, it makes sense, because he has no enemies”.

Dowden is close to Sunak, despite beating him in the selection of the Tory candidate for Hertsmere for the 2015 election. Dowden would have been Sunak’s chancellor if Liz Truss hadn’t needed Jeremy Hunt as an emergency replacement for Kwasi Kwarteng. Once Hunt had reassured the markets, it became difficult for the new PM to oust him. Dowden had to settle for a fixer role at the Cabinet Office in Sunak’s first cabinet, but after Dominic Raab’s resignation last month he now has No 2 status, which is almost as good as having the keys to the Treasury.

In a scenario in which the Tory party is not scratching around for scapegoats following an election defeat, Dowden could appeal to a broad church of MPs and members. Not just because, as his friend says, he is widely liked, but because he has a reputation for competence from his time as David Cameron’s deputy chief of staff – and because he can sound quite right-wing.

He supported Remain in 2016, but was one of the trio of mid-ranking ministers, along with Sunak and Robert Jenrick, who came out early for Boris Johnson, painting him as the only person who could get Brexit done and save the Tory party.

As Tory party chair last year he gave a speech to the Heritage Foundation in Washington that took no prisoners in challenging “woke warriors” and their attempts to “cancel” heroes of Western liberal history. It was a speech that wouldn’t have been out of place at the National Conservatism conference in Westminster this week – a US-influenced vision of conservative values that some commentators saw as a preview of the British Conservative future.

But Dowden also has a British working-class Tory identity that he tried to deploy against Angela Rayner at Prime Minister’s Questions, when he claimed that as a “comprehensive school boy” he understood the “lives of working people”. He is unusual in the Tory party in that his mother worked in Boots and his father was a factory worker who lost his job in a recession.

As culture secretary in Johnson’s cabinet, he hit the headlines for criticising the National Trust for “daring to explore colonial history”, as Sathnam Sanghera of The Times put it. He wasn’t afraid to divide opinion with his cultural tastes either, saying he preferred panto to opera, Beethoven to Beyonce, and Line of Duty toThe Crown.

If the Tories win, he could eclipse the three female candidates who are currently favourites for next leader in the betting market: Penny Mordaunt, Kemi Badenoch and Suella Braverman.

Indeed, one side-effect of this column’s exercise in speculative whatiffery is to cast some light on what might happen in what seems to be the more likely scenario of Tory election defeat. It is not obvious who would be best placed to navigate the slide towards Tory Corbynism that is likely to follow a return to opposition.

Mordaunt was praised for holding a sword for a long time, but the reasons her campaigns faltered in the two leadership contests of last year will still apply. Badenoch has made the mistake of accommodating reality too early, by accepting that you can’t bin all EU-derived law without checking whether it is a bad idea first. And Braverman needs to resign very soon if she is not to be held responsible, as Priti Patel was before her, for the failures of this government’s immigration policy.

Win or lose the next election, the Tory succession is a wide open expanse of the unknown. There are several unexpected people it could be, and Oliver Dowden is one of them.