Tory Tribulations

What does the UK Leadership contest mean to Wales' second Party?

By the end of next week the vast majority of Conservative Party members who intend to do so will have voted for either Kemi Badenock or Robert Jenrick. Although the winner is not due to be announced until November the de facto situation is that Jenrick has a matter of days to make up ground on Badenock. A Conservative Home ‘ticker’ poll of declared Conservative members who read their website conducted directly following the pitches at Party Conference shows Badenock on 32 per cent support compared to 19 per cent for Jenrick.

If she does win Badenock will enjoy both a mandate from her parliamentary colleagues having topped the final poll of MPs and from the grassroots members. For better or worse she will lead the Party into the next general election, presumably sometime in 2029.

For what it’s worth my view is that the final eliminated candidate James Cleverly has dodged a bullet. He might have stood a fair chance against Jenrick despite the extremely right-wing complexion of the current Tory membership; but I doubt in current circumstances that he could have halted the Badenock bandwagon. Given the size of the mountain the Tories have to climb just to deprive Labour of an outright majority in 2029 he may be well positioned to be the Cameron to Badenock’s Hague. If Badenock can make the really hard yards of fighting off Reform’s challenge from the right then Cleverly could be worth backing as the next Tory PM (although only if you fancy locking up your stake for at least a decade).

Until this point there has been no Welsh input into the UK Leadership contest. Every single Welsh Conservative MP was defeated by Labour  (or in Brecon, Radnor & Cwm Tawe the Liberal Democrats) in July. Conservative MS had no vote in the elimination rounds and have no voice in the 1922 Committee which oversees Leadership contests.

Yet the 2026 Senedd elections are an absolutely critical milestone in positioning the Tory Party to seriously challenge for a majority in 2029. A failure to win more MS than Reform would quite simply be catastrophic for the Leader in Westminster given the close historic correlation between voting patterns in Wales and England.

To me this explains a great deal of the positioning adopted by Andrew RT Davies and his Senedd colleagues. Their primary objective is to squeeze out any room for criticism from the right. Their primary target voter is  not those ‘hero’ voters who abandoned them for Labour (& the LibDems) in July; rather it is Mr Toad from ‘Wind in the Willows’ whose support they are attempting to court.

Such a strategy (if you can elevate a Party’s basic survival instinct to such a label) is happily also consistent with the combative personality and appeal of Andrew RT Davies. Despite calls from ‘one nation’ ex-Tory MPs such as Stephen Crabb and Guto Bebb on him to step down in sequence with Sunak there appears to be little appetite for a challenge within his MS Group. Despite high hopes ARTD made few real inroads against Mark Drakeford’s Labour Party in 2021; but he did succeed in obliterating the UKIP contingent (Labour went from 26 seats to 30, the Tories from11 to 16). A repeat of this qualified success in 2026 is probably the outer limit of Tory hopes.

It will be interesting and possibly revealing to discover the identity of the Shadow Secretary of State for Wales. The gig is currently held by Lord Byron Davies in combination with that of Welsh Party Chairman (Conservatives insist on gendering the post title; which has never been held by a member of the majority gender). It remains unclear who on the opposition frontbench will be tasked with cross examining Jo Stevens and her team at Welsh questions in the Commons.

If the next Leader were to appoint a close ally purely to reinforce her/his position in the shadow cabinet without consulting ARTD that humiliation might be sufficient to convince him to walk away (potentially to Reform); so one assumes it won’t happen particularly since both surviving contenders are firmly on the Tory right. What ARTD will be keen to ensure is that the English (or noble) Shadow SoS is not regarded as the equal of the Tories candidate to be Prif Weinidog. Until now the job has officially been limited to the Leader of the Conservative Group in the Senedd; effectively the same status as the Leader of any principal authority political Group.

Perhaps more important will be how the Tories finesse the constitutional issues thrown-up by devolution in the context of denying ground to Nigel Farage’s marauders on their right flank. It is far from obvious where the optimal position lies. Although the abolition of devolution maybe popular with Tory members, there’s still a significant chunk of Tory voters who consider themselves patriots and can sing Hen Wlad Fy’n Nhaddau. The Welsh nationalists are not assailed from the left as ‘daffodil tories’ without some reason. It isn’t a criticism to say that Plaid are capable of a very high degree of pragmatism on all issues not directly connected with progress toward the goal of separation from England.  It’s a delicate balance between stymieing Farage and losing a chunk of your base to Rhun ap Iorweth and here the inclinations of the shadow SoS will clearly be of significance.

It is not for your correspondent to offer political strategy advice to a Party I have never supported; but if I were to it would be that Reform (much like the LibDems) are essentially a repository for protest votes from people who loathe both major parties more or less equally but cannot bring themselves to simply abstain. Specific policies of such parties are irrelevant to their voters since nobody expects them ever to win power. Vibes matter; but a party that aspires to return to governing the UK cannot afford to alienate centrist voters. Conservatism may not be my philosophy; but it is a coherent and entirely legitimate political ideology. Attempting to follow or imitate the nativist and authoritarian agenda of Reform will not win you a general election no matter how disillusioned the voters become with Labour. The political pendulum will swing back eventually  - so long as voters feel the only alternative can be trusted to govern responsibly. Conservatives could do worse than considering the position Labour was in in 2019 and vowing not to go there.