Tory leadership woes

[lovingboth]

Where IDS has made a politically fatal mistake is in not calling for a leadership election himself a la John Major.

If he had done so, he'd have forced the slimy Michael Howard et al to either come out publicly and stand against him - and be seen by the membership as having been responsible for the mess - or be forced to make the calculation as to whether or not to support who ever was brave enough to stand.

If say David Davies did, Howard would have to hope that Davies got enough votes to topple IDS, but not enough to actually win himself. Tricky!

Now there's going to be a vote of confidence in which they'll both say in public how wonderful IDS is while voting 'no' in private. When - and I'm sure it will be when - IDS loses, they'll stand in the subsequent leadership election saying 'I regret that he lost, but now I am free to stand, I didn't cause this, vote for me.'

Comments

[drdoug.livejournal.com]

Reckon you're right about the likely course of events, but I don't think it was a certain thing last week that there would be enough votes to trigger a confidence vote. People were pretty startled by Major's call (I was gobsmacked meself), and while it did keep the leadership off the news agenda once it was over, it didn't exactly leave him as a powerful leader in control of the party.

My take is that IDS guessed that if he resigned to trigger an election, he might not win it convincingly enough to look like a leader the party could unite behind successfully. (Remember a Certain Other Tory Leader who left after failing to win a leadership election with a big enough margin?) He bet that there was a better chance that Francis Maude and one or two others could be faced down than that he would win an election with sufficient margin. I think that was the best bet of a bad lot. Of course, now, in retrospect, it now looks like he was doomed all along with choices like that ... but I really don't want to say that!

[lovingboth]

The problem with that strategy is that it relies on Tory MPs not doing in private what they are, as a whole, too frit to do in public (eg calling for the vote, and actually voting against him.)

And that's a silly thing to have done, as he will soon realise. Particularly as he's only in the job because he's not Ken Clarke and not Michael Portillo.

Major got more votes in that leadership election than he did in the 1990 one, where he had just less than half the votes in the second round but both Heseltine and Hurd withdrew anyway!