Lee David Evans: Are Conservative Party leadership rules fit for purpose?

It did not used to be so easy for the party to ditch its leaders

The chaotic end of David Cameron’s leadership of the Conservative Party disguised one of its most remarkable features: stability. Cameron served 3,870 days as leader, more than his two predecessors, Iain Duncan Smith and Michael Howard, and three successors, Theresa May, Boris Johnson and Liz Truss, combined. Unlike Duncan Smith, May and Johnson, Cameron never suffered the indignity of a confidence vote among Conservative MPs - or even seemed to come close. But for its closing weeks, 2005-2016 is arguably the only happy stint at the top of the Tory party in over a generation.

Cameron was the third Conservative leader chosen under leadership rules introduced in the aftermath of the party’s 1997 defeat (which are still in use today). The rules have two principal features. Firstly, MPs are not the sole deciders of who leads the party. Instead, they choose two of their colleagues to be voted upon by Conservative party members. And secondly, whilst the members ultimately pick the leader, it is the confidence of MPs that determines their duration in charge. In effect, one group of people decides who becomes leader; another group decides when their time is up. Six leaders have come and gone since those rules were introduced and, excluding Cameron, they have averaged just 768 days as leader - just over two years.

On two of the four occasions members have picked the leader, MPs have lost confidence and removed them before they could fight an election. For Duncan Smith this took 784 days; for Truss, a mere 49. (In both cases the members’ chosen leader had been the second preference of MPs.) Sir Graham Brady, the longest-serving and arguably most consequential Chairman of the 1922 Committee, and former leader Lord Howard, have both floated the idea that the role of members should be reduced. ‘In an ideal world, when the party is in government I think the parliamentary party should make the decision’, Sir Graham said at the launch of a history book of the committee he chairs. Yet the members on whom political parties often depend in the constituencies are likely to guard their right to pick the leader fiercely. What’s more, they could reasonably deflect any criticism of their choice back on to the MPs who gave them the final duo of candidates to choose from.

At the other end of the process, letters from just 15% of MPs, sent privately to the Chairman of the 1922 Committee, are required to bring about a confidence vote in a leader. For Duncan Smith in 2003, the threshold was just 25. Ninety MPs voted against him, with only 75 expressing confidence. Whilst Duncan Smith is the only leader to have lost such a vote, a small number of letters leading to an unsustainably large rebellion against the leadership has been a recurring theme. 48 letters were needed to initiate the up-or-down ballot on Theresa May in 2018; 117 MPs ultimately voted against her. Similarly, the 54 missives required to force a vote on Johnson in 2022 swelled to 148 actual no confidence votes. Even though May and Johnson won their ballots, the process begun by a relatively small number of MPs proved fatal to their leaderships.

It wasn’t always so easy to ditch a Tory leader. Historically, party leaders held a ‘freehold’ on the top spot in their party, with no formal mechanism for their removal. Malcontents needed to either persuade the leader to go or wait for an act of God to intervene. Things changed in 1975 when the beleaguered Edward Heath, although not persuaded to resign, agreed to subject himself to a leadership ballot (which in his case amounted to the same thing). Conservative leaders were thereafter subject to annual re-election, typically uncontested, and with any challenge to their authority requiring an actual rival candidate. The model introduced in 1975 wasn’t perfect, but the next two party leaders - Margaret Thatcher and John Major - led for fifteen years and seven years, respectively. The post-1998 rules, which replaced annual re-election with leadership elections only when a vacancy arose, have ironically proved more unstable.

How might the Conservatives restore stability to the party leadership? Options abound. For the election of a leader, reforms could focus on reducing the likelihood of a divergence between MPs and members. The introduction of an MPs’ indicative vote between the final two leadership contenders, for example, would give a clearer signal to members as to where parliamentary support lies. More dramatically, the role of members could be reformed, made advisory or even brought to an end. At the other end of the process, the party could raise the threshold required to trigger a confidence vote, preventing a fringe of the party’s MPs - currently less than 1 in 6 - from being about to hasten the demise of a leader. Another option would be to revert to the past and require an actual rival candidate to challenge an incumbent leader, rather than MPs voting no confidence in the hope of replacing the current leader with their preferred candidate (or themselves).

Over the past quarter of a century, the Conservative Party’s leadership rules have helped produce a roster of rapidly rising and falling leaders with only one, David Cameron, truly able to establish himself at the helm. The rules themselves cannot carry all of the blame for the tumult. But they have exacerbated the challenges of leadership and made the party (and, at times, the country) less stable. It’s time they were changed.

Lee David Evans is a John Ramsden Fellow at the Mile End Institute at Queen Mary University of London.