Stefan Rousseau/PA
The battle for the soul of the Conservative Party began in earnest in central London on Tuesday as delegates gathered for the launch of the new Popular Conservatives movement – dubbed the PopCons in Westminster – to much fanfare.
Former prime minister Liz Truss delivered the keynote speech, seeking to galvanise Britain’s “secret” Conservatives, while ex-Cabinet minister Sir Jacob Rees-Mogg declared that the “age of Davos man is over” and Lee Anderson even had his very own ‘concrete-growing’ moment.
Nigel Farage, the former Brexit Party leader, was watching from the side.
Speculation over a new faction has been mounting since the Tory Party Conference in Manchester, where Liz Truss pulled bigger crowds than most Cabinet ministers and the presence of Nigel Farage was palpable.
The Conservative Growth Group, as it was called then, was said to have the support of 60 MPs, which is a sizeable chunk of the parliamentary party and enough to threaten Rishi Sunak’s majority in the Commons.
Many of them, if not all, will have sided with Sir Bill Cash when he tabled an amendment on the Rwanda Bill, dealing the PM with a devastating but not fatal blow.
But this isn’t about whether the Conservative Party survives battles from within for the rest of this administration. Even Lee Anderson couldn’t bring himself to vote against the Rwanda Bill at the third reading following some good-natured ribbing from his former Labour colleagues.
This is about what shape the Conservative Party of the future will take.
Backed by former prime ministers, Cabinet members and political heavyweights from outside the party, the Popular Conservatives have the firepower to either seize control of the party in the aftermath of the general election or, failing that, split it in two.
Populist issues such as lower taxes, net zero, European Courts, culture wars and immigration could also garner some support among the electorate if the party steers away from catch-all politics to single-issue matters in a sort of Brexit 2.0 manner.
As Donald Trump closes in on a second bite of the cherry across the Atlantic, people could soon start asking whether the shame of an insurrection in the US and economic mayhem in the UK is still enough to consign our political leaders to the annals of history.
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