And they’re off! The Tory leadership race is underway

It’s almost as if someone in Whitehall has been leaning on the fast forward button. This government has gone through several life-cycles rapidly: from sunny euphoria to teething problems and aggro, to less than amicable separation, and all in under four years. You usually only get to see ministerial performances as inept as James Brokenshire’s well into a third term, when there is no-one else left to promote. But we’re there already. And now, to top it all, the Tory leadership race is underway before Prime Minster Cameron has even lost power.

That so much energy is already being spent by the candidates’ friends and supporters tells you that, whatever the official line may be, senior Conservatives are pessimistic about their chances in next year’s general election. The economic recovery has, so far, done nothing for levels of Tory support. Yesterday’s ComRes poll in the Sunday Mirror suggested only 9% of people feel that life has become more affordable in recent times. Whether or not George Osborne really told members of the 1922 committee that voters were happy to enter the 40% income tax band because it made them feel “more Tory”, few people on the government benches seem to have a good answer as to why better-sounding growth rates have not been translated into support in the polls. This could yet change in the course of the next 14 months. But the belief that we are living through a “voteless recovery” is clearly widespread. Hence the gloom among many Tories, and hence all the manoeuvering.

With just over a year to go to the next election supporters of George Osborne, Boris Johnson, Theresa May and Michael Gove are keeping busy. To what extent this is being done with the encouragement or even knowledge of the protagonists is not entirely clear. But tongues are wagging. Yesterday’s apparently well-sourced account of a “tipsy” Michael Gove belittling Boris Johnson’s leadership ambitions will not have calmed matters down at all.

It is all a bit less elevated than the machinations of the Tory “magic circle” 50 years ago, when Alec Douglas Home emerged to take over as Tory leader from the ailing Harold Macmillan – benefiting, incidentally, from the change in legislation brought about by Tony Benn’s long campaign to be allowed to renounce his peerage in the early 60s. Back then, too, there were mutterings about the number of Etonians with influence at the head of the party. But no-one spoke quite as bluntly and openly on that subject as Michael Gove did to the FT at the weekend.

This intervention is the most curious of all. Fair enough if, after a couple of glasses of Rupert Murdoch’s excellent wine, the education secretary shared his view that the chancellor would make a better successor to Cameron than the Mayor of London. But how odd, in a moment of sobriety, to criticise the excessive number of Etonians (and there are quite a few of them) who work closely with the PM. Not only this, but the slightly less expensively educated Mr Osborne is likely to be bracketed in the public’s mind with the other elite figures referred to by Gove. So why would the alleged future running mate of the chancellor (effectively) criticise him in this way? Weird. For all his extravagant and repeated denials of ambition for the top job, Gove is clearly a player, and not ruling himself out. Indeed, if he has calculated that Boris and Osborne will take each other out, he has every reason to keep his name in the frame. How odd if, in the guise of offering support to Osborne, Gove were in fact to be playing his own clever long term game.

Such is the mess of ambition, hurt feelings and rivalry now playing out at the top of the Conservative Party. This too has come a bit sooner than might have been expected, all part of this fast-forwarded government. It’s a good thing that they don’t have much left on their agenda before May 2015, because otherwise such tensions might have proved seriously damaging to the administration.