The political art of stabbing in the back is a complex and often confusing topic of discussion.
For example, in the Conservative Party, where the hard and fast rules on how to oust a leader are found in black and white in the party’s rule book, conspiring to overthrow a leader is an accepted and valid course of action.
In the Labor Party, on the other hand, the rules make it virtually impossible to challenge an incumbent leader, and even talking about it is culturally frowned upon and considered treason (like many things in Labor, of course). The only leader who has faced a formal challenge in recent years has been Jeremy Corbyn, who has survived thanks to the continued support of the party’s common members, and despite the opposition of 80% of his own MPs, such as it was expressed in an unofficial vote of censure.
It is important to understand this cultural difference between the two main parties: the main task of the Conservative leader is to win the election and if it is perceived that he does not have this capacity, they will be replaced. In the Labor Party, the leader is supposed to be there for life or at least until after the next election defeat, and even then there is no guarantee that he will fall on his sword.
That is why some on the left look at their opponents in the Conservative Party with ill-concealed contempt; The Conservatives’ perpetual will to sacrifice anything and anyone for electoral survival is seen as a vulgar point by the Labor Party. Winning is not everything, they seem to say.
Except it is. And the Tories understand it in a way that Labor has never done, and I suspect they never will.
When Gordon Brown, as Prime Minister, was lagging behind in the polls behind an optimistic and cheerful David Cameron, Labor MPs lined up to support him, not because they thought he could win the next election and save his own seats; they explicitly believed the opposite, but because in the Labor Party, loyalty to an individual leader is their own reward. We ignore the fact that that reward, in 2010, was George Osborne, austerity and, ultimately, Brexit.
Assessed from this perspective, the omens for Boris Johnson are not great. His party is behind Labor by four to ten points for most of a year, thanks in large part to a constant media focus on partygate. Conservative MPs are considering (quite naturally) who would be best placed to maximize the Conservative vote in the next election and therefore save their own parliamentary careers. They should not be condemned for such a cynical look; he has served the party well for many decades.
It is quite plausible that those considering filing a letter of censure with Johnson have analyzed the current situation and concluded that someone else would have a better chance of electoral success than him. However, despite the frequency with which Conservative MPs have enforced their rules and ousted incumbent prime ministers, they must approach the coming days and weeks with caution. Dismissing a prime minister is a serious matter and should only be attempted in the most serious and obscure circumstances.
In 1990, there was really no alternative (ironically) to the removal of Mrs. Thatcher. His ideological insistence that the election tax was a good idea and should remain, no doubt, would have seen the job in office in a couple of years. Theresa May avoided the same fate by jumping before being pushed, but she had already shown that her campaigning skills were not up to the task of getting another victory in the general election, so she had to go.
Does Boris Johnson fit this same pattern? An Opinium poll for the Observer over the weekend suggested Labor had only a three-point lead. Even surveys that revealed a greater advantage tend not to reach double figures. This is not 1996 territory where Labor enjoyed a spectacular 25-30 point lead. In any case, even with the party door still ruminating (although it is certainly less interesting for voters than before) and the ongoing cost of living crisis, the highlight of Labor leadership is how modest it is. is. In normal times (for those old enough to remember them), traditional opposition mid-term opinion polls were considerably more impressive.
Twice in the last 12 years, voters have used a general election to hold a hanging parliament. On one occasion they gave David Cameron the most modest and finest majority. And on one occasion they gave the Conservatives a majority of 80 seats. If Conservative MPs want, by the force of a rather short period of deficits in opinion polls, to eliminate the man who gave the latter result, they risk replacing him with the kind of politician who delivered a of those others, less impressive, results of the last decade.
None of this suggests that Johnson should be given the kind of free passage that Labor leaders always receive, regardless of their electoral record or popularity. That would not be the conservative way. But we are only halfway through the current parliament. There is still time to sit down and judge whether Johnson is able to reverse this electoral deficit.
This summer it looks like it will deliver a series of disappointing by-elections that will no doubt provoke another round of distress among nervous MPs. Calm down, Janet (as young people seem to say). We expect MPs to exercise their survival instinct, but we also expect them to do so in a considered and measured manner, pressing the nuclear “no confidence” button only when all alternatives have been exhausted.
At the moment we are very far from that. Things could be very different in a year. And voter confidence is less likely to return while a significant proportion of the ruling party is seen in panic mode.