We’re witnessing the slow self-destruction of the Tory party

There comes a point in the life of a party too long in power when what used to be the normal kind of periodic manageable crises become endemic and unmanageable. It looks and feels as if it’s self-destructing. Every positive initiative, every fragment of encouraging economic news, every success is quickly subsumed by some grimier scandal, a bit of sleaze or a gaffe that blows any slender chance of recovery in the polls.

One minute Rishi Sunak is basking in the warm glow of Elon Musk and wittering about artificial intelligence; 48 hours later, he’s trying to deal with claims about a serial rapist who is still a serving Conservative member of parliament.

But hold any sympathy you might have for Sunak and ask yourself what he might have done better on this particular matter over the past year, and what he knew about it and when. All governments can suffer from external shocks – Covid, energy crises, wars; but sometimes they can be the authors of their destruction.

Right now, the decline looks terminal. Nothing shifts the polls, because the “media narrative” is set. Or, in less pretentious, conspiratorial terms, the public have made their minds up about a party’s fitness to govern. The voters stop listening and even when the opposition turns into difficulties of its own, nothing makes any difference. For the Conservatives, that time arrived a while ago. The mood for change – when it becomes as entrenched as it is now – is the most powerful in democratic politics. Almost every day the Tories deliver some new reasons for them to be ejected from power ASAP.

It was the case back in 1997, when a genuinely strong economy was buried by sleaze and incompetence and the curtain came down on John Major. This time things, to mutilate a familiar phrase, seem only able to get worse. The economy is performing nowhere near as well as it was then, and, even with inflation gradually slowing, people will be worse off than they were in 2019, and will feel poorer than in 2010. Brexit hasn’t lived up to the promises and the deprived towns in the North have been let down as well as left behind.

But the sleaze of the Major years has been replaced by a much darker kind of immorality. While in those days the sense was that a hapless Major was out of control of his party, in recent years it was the party leader himself who was part of the problem. It was Johnson who presided over Partygate; Johnson the “trolley” who mismanaged Covid and thought the disease was nature’s way of getting rid of old people; and Johnson who appointed and then encouraged his ministers to lie about the sex pest Chris Pincher. In the context of cover-up allegations, it might fairly be noted that Johnson has never been a great one for transparency.

The accusations of a cover-up by the Conservative Party of some of the most serious criminal offences by one of its MPs could scarcely be graver, or more credible. This goes far beyond “tractor porn” or consensual extra-marital affairs. It follows the disturbing story of Peter Bone, where serious allegations against him by members of staff – always denied by Bone – were kept private until the parliamentary watchdog published its report. That hasn’t covered the party in glory, and, inevitably another by-election will follow, and another seat lost to Labour.

We have not seen anything like this at the top of government before.

Because the charges are levelled by Nadine Dorries, herself a source of much controversy, some might discount them. They should not. In fact – extraordinarily – the allegations of criminality were made by a former Tory chairperson and a former government chief whip, Jake Berry and Wendy Morton, who found themselves shocked at what they discovered was going on and decided to do the right thing. Eventually. They left their respective jobs when the Liz Truss government fell – but not before, it must be said.

More cynically, you might say they decided that they wanted to minimise any damage to their political careers and their reputations and standing. Either way, it is a rare example of people in senior roles in public life at some point doing the decent thing.

Apparently, before sending their letter to police detectives, Berry and Morton had commissioned an internal investigation via No 10 which confirmed some of their worst suspicions – and suggests that the most senior figures in government at the time were aware of the potentially explosive stories about one of their MPs. Common sense suggests they would have needed to know.

The subsequent report warned that the case had been handled so poorly that the party could find itself criminally liable. The author stated: “It is my view that if this did end up in court, not only would [one of the alleged victims] be poorly served and have a poor success rate but the party would be severely at risk of prosecution because of the piecemeal approach we have applied in this case and no doubt others.”

And it is the victims in all these cases of rape and assault who have been betrayed by the party they once served and wanted to play a part in. They were the ones gaslighted. They were the ones the party machine tried to keep quiet. They were the ones the party’s more senior figures seemed to want to maintain a distance from by inserting some plausible deniability. It looks as though their aim was rarely to see justice done and the perpetrators punished but to keep it out of the newspapers and avoid by-elections.

It usually worked in the past, but times are changing. Victims can make their voices heard on social media, and they are being heard.

The Conservative Party as an institution is hardly unique in this instinct for self-protection – to deny everything and form a protective circle around one of their own. All the parties do it, as does every other body from the BBC to big banks to the churches and even charities. But it doesn’t work very well these days, and when the truth comes out, the damage is even worse.

As the old saying goes, it’s not the crime that gets you, but the cover-up. Something the Tory party is about to discover. Again.