If the Tories are heading for defeat, they should meet their fate with dignity

I was up for Portillo in 1997. I remember his gracious speech at the count in Enfield Southgate, watched by the young and sheepish Labour candidate who had won a seat that even in that landslide had seemed safe for the Conservatives. “My first duty is to congratulate Stephen Twigg on his victory,” said the man who had been about to become Tory leader. “I think he’ll be a very good member of parliament, and I wish him well with it.”

Contrast that with the shameful and cowardly way the defeated Conservative by-election candidate in Tamworth skulked off without a word in the early hours of Friday morning. Andrew Cooper left the stage immediately after the results were announced, without waiting to hear the successful candidate’s speech.

We are witnessing the breakdown of discipline in an army in retreat. Cooper had already made his contribution to the lowering of standards in public life. One of the issues in the Tamworth campaign was a three-year-old social media post of his, in which he suggested that people who claim not to be able to feed their children but who can afford Sky TV should “f*** off”.

This was in Tamworth: the birthplace of the Conservative Party, the home of the Tamworth manifesto issued by Sir Robert Peel in 1834, which not only set out the principles to which the party adheres, but which codified the idea of the mandate, essential to the working of popular democracy.

There were mutterings among local Tories after the defeat in Tamworth that Cooper had somehow avoided the full rigours of candidate selection, which meant that the party “failed to pick up their concerns about his electability”. I suspect that the real problem was that the Tories could not persuade a high-quality candidate to stand, because even if they had held the seat, the winner would have been an MP for only a few months.

The Tamworth party has already selected a candidate for the general election: Eddie Hughes, the MP for Walsall North, whose seat is to be abolished in the boundary review. Hughes could not have fought the by-election without giving up his Walsall North seat and causing another by-election there, so a stop-gap candidate had to be found. Thus Cooper was drafted and failed to fulfil the confident prediction of a woman on TikTok who appears to be his wife that he was the next MP for Tamworth – “and I always get what I want because I’m that kind of a girl”.

The failings of a by-election candidate are part of a bigger question: one of how the Conservative Party approaches the prospect of defeat in a general election, and how it handles itself if it is actually defeated.

The next thing Michael Portillo said in his speech in 1997 was this: “We are obviously also going to have a new government. The government has to represent this country and do its best, and I wish the new government well too.” If Conservative MPs are thinking about their election-night speeches, they could do worse than to copy the tone of their lost leader from a quarter of a century ago.

So far, the signs are not good. The sniping at Rishi Sunak has already begun in earnest from anonymous MPs and leaked WhatsApp groups. As well as being undignified, there is no point. The party is not going to change leader again in the 12 to 15 months it has left, so it might as well be polite about the one it has.

This is not just a matter of decency in public life, it is a question of self-interest. If the best the Tories can hope for at the general election is to minimise the losses, they need to show some discipline and look like public-spirited people who put the national interest above party.

That means playing by the rules. One of the many unwise things that Boris Johnson did was to try to fix the findings of the standards committee against Owen Paterson, the former cabinet minister, just because he was “one of us”. The only way democracy can work is if everyone accepts the rules. If one of your side breaks them, you apologise and move on. If you lose an election, you congratulate the winner and wish them well.

There was something Trumpian about Akinbusoye and Cooper failing to observe the proprieties, as if they did not accept the decisions of the people. It would be a terrible thing if such attitudes started to infect British politics, and decent Conservatives should resist it.

It will be bad enough for them if Sunak loses the election. It will be much worse if elements of the party rage against the voters for making the “wrong” decision – as elements of the Labour Party have done in the past. If the Conservatives are headed for defeat, they must meet their fate with dignity.

This article was amended on 22 October to acknowledge that Festus Akinbusoye, the Conservative candidate in the Mid Bedfordshire by-election, had shaken hands with Alistair Strathern, the victorious Labour candidate, embraced him and congratulated him before leaving the count.