There’s a reason why Conservative prime ministers are so bad

The Conservative's leadership election process is to political thinking what the Habsburg’s marriage policy was to genetics

Why does the Conservative party keep appointing such terrible leaders to become prime minister? There are actually some clear, structural reasons why this keeps happening, and the party could prevent it.

I have written plenty of times over these last years about how the British prime minister just couldn’t get worse. It’s been one of my least accurate predictions.

I quite liked David Cameron. He seemed like a nice enough guy. Looking at him, you could easily believe he was the prime minister of a relatively serious country. He made some big mistakes, but very much in the style of an otherwise credible political leader.

He oversaw ‘austerity’ which caused misery for many and laid the seeds for productivity in the UK to fall progressively ever since, crushing economic growth. By not investing in infrastructure, or in people, he made the country less productive and damaged the economy. His other obvious mistake was to call a referendum on remaining in the EU. This was not a major concern for most people but had been dividing his own political party for years, and he thought that offering a referendum would put a stop to this infighting and get his party under control. How wrong that was.

Then we had Theresa May. She was a weak leader who threw away a large parliamentary majority and pushed what could have been a mild Brexit into the extremist version that has since caused so much damage to the country, socially and economically. She also takes responsibility for the ‘hostile environment’ immigration policy that led both to the awful injustice of the Windrush Scandal, and to the country becoming more xenophobic when it most needed foreign workers. This had the double impact of damaging both society and the economy. She was clearly the worst prime minister in decades and deserved to be removed from office.

Her replacement, Boris Johnson, surprised everyone by being even worse than his own supporters had expected. Nobody had high expectations of Johnson, who already had form as an arrogant and lazy liar. Johnson easily stole the worst prime minister trophy from May. Whilst both Cameron and May made a few big mistakes, Johnson did so much wrong it is hard to list, let alone remember. He is the first prime minister to have broken the law whilst in office. He lied to everyone about everything. He was ineffectual as a manager and leader. His Downing Street was chaotic, and eventually a focus of illegal activity. He seriously undermined the reputation of the office of prime minister, his own party, and his country.

For a moment, it looked like he might be replaced with someone relatively normal and competent. There were plenty of Tories in the running who ranged from really very good through to still not that bad. But instead, we got Liz Truss. She has seized Johnson’s trophy and made it her own, marking herself out as the worst prime minister in modern times in only a matter of weeks. There wasn’t even a short period of calm before she destroyed her reputation and took the country down with her.

Two reasons why the Conservative party has made such a mess of the last 12 years are about diversity and ambition. Both need to be changed if the party is to stop damaging itself and the UK.

The diversity problem stems from the current system to elect a leader, which was introduced in 2001 by William Hague. It sees MPs vote down a long list of candidates until the last two then spend several months campaigning for the vote of the party members.

The first problem with this approach is that the party regularly returns leaders who have the support of the members but not the parliamentarians. This has exacerbated the infighting the party suffers from in a way that may not have been so bad if the leaders had been appointed by the parliamentarians he or she had to lead.

But the bigger problem is simply that having party members vote for the leader encourages popularism in the candidates rather than serious policy debate, and appeals to the stupidity of the minority, rather than the wisdom of the crowd.

Whilst Conservative MPs may be a small electorate to be choosing a leader, they are themselves elected by a very large electorate. In theory, our MPs are representatives of the people, having been put in Parliament through a general election. By voting for them, the electorate basically delegates to them the job of becoming experts in politics and policy. They bring to bear both their political knowledge and their accountability to their constituents when they elect a leader, especially if that leader will immediately become prime minister.

William Hague’s decision to open up the vote to the membership took that final decision away from a small group of experts elected by a large number of voters and gave it to a very small group of amateurs, self-appointed to their role, and totally devoid of the demographic diversity that sits behind the election of an MP. The party members pay £20 to join the party, and are not subject to any accountability of they make a stupid choice. If an MP elects an idiot as prime minister, he or she will risk losing their seat at the next election. When party members pick a moron they just get the next leadership candidates wanting to befriend them.

By my own calculation, Liz Truss was elected by 0.12% of the population. That is 57% of the votes cast by 82.6% of a self-appointed electorate representing 0.26% of the population; or 81,326 votes from a pool of 172,437 voters, out of a population of 67,440,000.

The 81,326 who appointed the current prime minister are not remotely diverse. According to a university research project, “63% of Conservative Party members are male, 40% are over 65, 6% aged 18–24, 80% say they are in the three highest economic and social groups by wealth and education, and over 90% identify as white British.”

Democracy is meant to use the wisdom of the crowd to select the best people to run the country. While it has its ups and downs, it generally works well. We look to our politicians to protect our wellbeing. That is why healthcare, education, and the economy are always the most important political topics. When a government starts to make a mess one or more of these, they tend to get removed from power. Over a longer timeframe, we have become progressively wealthier and healthier in a way that has not happened in countries that are not democracies.

The recent Conservative party has a history of ignoring experts. This has run from Brexit through to the current economic crisis they are causing. Experts will also tell you that getting 120,000 very similar people to make a complicated decision is less effective than getting millions of people to make that decision, or for those millions to appoint some experts to make it for them.

When you give that much power to a very small, self-selected group of people the candidates for leader have to pander to them. This encourages populist policies and a lack of political seriousness. This has been most obvious with Trump and Truss.

By letting a tiny group of very similar people select their leader, the Conservative party is doing the very opposite of what elections are meant to achieve. There is no correction for bias, no wisdom of a crowd. It also perpetuates the Tory crisis of having leaders who do not have the support of their parliamentarians.

This process also encourages the second major problem with the Conservative party, which you can see clearly in its last four prime ministers: each of them had always wanted to be prime minister. It was a driving ambition, and for each of them it was an ambition about themselves. They wanted to reach the pinnacle of power and of achievement in politics. That was the end goal, nothing more.

I read somewhere, and I forget who said it, that a unique thing about the Conservative party is that they want power just for the sake of having power. There is no real underlying plan that drives them to want power, no greater vision. Power is not a means to an end.

Arguably, that may not be totally correct. Margaret Thatcher clearly had an ideology and came to power wanting to achieve something with that power. More recently, there have been some Conservative MPs who clearly stand for something, mainly One Nation Conservativism, which is an admirable concept. But they have widely been side-lined by people who are just clambering over each other to get another step up the political hierarchy, ever closer to the power.

One reason for this is a fundamental difference between Labour and the Conservative party, which lies at the heart of British society. Traditionally, the Conversative party is part of The Establishment. Aristocrats are Tories. Rich businessmen are Tories. If you want to rise up the social ladder and social status matters to you, the way to get closer to The Establishment is to become a Conservative. If you aspire for higher social status, you don’t join the Labour party. Labour is the party of the workers. That is not to say that all Tories are socially aspiring, just that if you do want a leg up the social ladder you join the Conservative party. Labour is simply not a route to feeling more like an aristocrat.

Consequently, the Conservative party tends to attract people who crave higher status just for the sake of having it. Through that lens a lot of the recent Cabinet members make more sense.

Ambition creates an associated problem, which is loyalty. In a party where people will do anything to get promoted, they will become overly loyal to whomever holds the key to higher status. This has led to the last four Conservative prime ministers promoting people who are loyal over those who are competent. Kwasi Kwarteng is the most startling recent example of this.

The Conservative party has become a party in which those with principles and intellect are side-lined by ruthlessly ambitious colleagues who will say, do, and be whatever it takes to get promoted. Brexit accelerated this. It was a policy that could not realistically be supported by anyone willing to consider data, facts, and experts. Those Tories with principles and serious minds could not support Brexit, and got pushed aside by the more populist members who were willing to embrace a policy that had become an electoral football. This reached its nadir with Johnson’s great purge, where he kicked out of the party some of its longest serving, most capable, and most serious politicians in order to end debate and dissent within his party.

The ambitious populists who have now consumed the Conservative party want power as a means to getting more power. They want high office because of its status. It is really just a competition for them, and they will play any hand to win. Look at how all three of the last Conservative prime ministers have gone from arguing the UK should remain in Europe because leaving would cause huge damage to becoming outspoken supporters of Brexit. At least Cameron distinguished himself by having a view, standing by it, and then resigning when his view was rejected. Johnson, May, and Truss have all been willing to abandon any principles or beliefs they may have had, or pretended to have, in order to get the top job — this is classic populism.

Because becoming prime minister was the end of their ambition, rather than the platform from which to realise some further ambition, all three of them found that once they did land the top job, they really had no idea what to do with it. They didn’t arrive in Downing Street excited at last to be able deliver on a political vision they had been developing for years, and for which they had won a resounding political mandate. Brexit was not that. For that kind of political vision, you have to look back to when Blair and Brown came into office and immediately started to reshape the country with policies that had been honed over years of planning and thought.

All four of the last prime ministers had an undying belief in themselves that was not based on any actual abilities. All of them were completely out of their depth in office — the urge to be prime minister was in no way matched by the ability to be prime minister.

The Conservative party has itself to blame for this run of rotten prime ministers. It embraces the worst characteristics of people whose ambition should rule them out of political office, and it has given undue power to a self-selected group of people who lack the diversity or expertise to make a sensible decision about who should lead the party or the country. Their leadership election process is to political thinking what the Habsburg’s marriage policy was to genetics.

The party urgently needs to return to letting the parliamentarians decide who will lead them — for the sake of the party and of the country.