Aspiring Conservative Party leaders jockey for position

The Conservatives should have sensed that the quest to lead them was getting out of hand as early as last October. When Nicky Morgan publicly envisaged herself fronting the party of Churchill and Thatcher on the back of 15 nondescript months in the cabinet, a free-for-all was in effect.

If the education secretary's presumption seems only normal, it is because we have chosen to normalise it. Since David Cameron blurted his intention to step down before 2020, everything said by any plausible successor has been studied for ulterior motives, as if personal advancement to the exclusion of all else is the natural way of things.

Real money and real people are caught up in George Osborne’s work as chancellor of the exchequer, yet every austerity measure and corporate tax settlement is read as a twist in the screenplay of his career.

Whether Britain remains in the EU is the largest question any serving politician will ever answer, but we almost expect home secretary Theresa May and London mayor Boris Johnson to decide on the tawdriest calculations.

Faced with virtually any event in government, neutral scribes, Conservative and even Labour MPs looking for a jaunty distraction from their own party’s rolling farce are poised with the questions of a huckster: Who gains? What is the angle here?

If the protagonists are as cynical as we believe, Britain is in trouble. Ambition can end up distorting the business of government, as rivals view policy choices as moves in a card game. The state becomes a venue for their frivolity. If they are not – and the stereotype of politics as a blade- strewn pit of intrigue is as exaggerated as I, Claudius – it says something that we would excuse them if they were.

Non-existent vacancy

You need only momentarily disengage from this leadership race to see the sheer nonsense of it. The race is for a vacancy that does not exist, may not exist until 2019 – the prime minister’s favoured date of departure – and should not exist even then.

Cameron won a general election only nine months ago. He is not yet 50. Next to the prime ministers who were physically hollowed out by the stresses of power, he looks like he has spent the past five years in a spa. He still often scores a net-positive approval rating in a country that has had a decade to tire of his patter.

Were Cameron to renege on his commitment to quit, the only mystery at the next election would be whether Labour emerges with enough votes to bother carrying on as a party.

Unless Britons choose to leave the EU, there is no good reason for Cameron to retire, and therefore no good reason for either the dreary jockeying to replace him or the minute-by-minute conjecture it has spawned. He has a lot to answer for.

The race is not even about anything. May seems a slightly more conventional conservative than Osborne or Johnson, with their London sensibilities and global interests. Beyond that, finding substance in their three-way tussle – if, as everyone assumes, it really exists – is like trying to pierce vapour with a spoon. This is politics within politics and politics for the sake of politics.

It is nice of the Conservatives to provide their own competition in the absence of any from Labour, but not if it runs out of control and trivialises government. The Tories should remember that they are running a country, not an internal recruitment process.

Some sport and gossip might be excused during a sleepy patch in British history. But the coming years could include Brexit, an economic downturn and further military action abroad. If politicians and those who chronicle their doings have an excuse, it is boredom.

Between 1997 and Cameron’s arrival as Tory leader eight years later, all meaningful politics took place within Labour because its opponents were so dire. The intraparty court politics of the period – the human tendency to “gather around poles” as Ed Balls, a treasury adviser at the time, recently phrased it – filled the space where interparty competition should have been.

Looking back, it was the narcissism of small differences. It was also a waste of talent and energy that materially affected the running of the country. The Tories are nowhere close to that kind of fever, but they are starting to find the question of Cameron’s successor more interesting than is healthy, much earlier than is necessary.

Cameron will not undo his pledge to leave, but he should instruct his party to focus on what matters, for there is rather a lot of it. And the rest of us should follow. – Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2016