CR can tonight reveal that Dessie “the Wolfman” Swayne isn’t going to be Cameron’s PPS in Number 10. Instead, he’s planning to stand for the chairmanship of the 1922 Committee, in an effort by the leadership to outflank Graham Brady with someone marginally more presentable to the traditional Right than an old school pro-European wet like Richard Ottaway. Swayne lost out on the natural MOD job that his was due during the coalition negotiations, and always remained more agreeable to his old friends on the Eurosceptic Right in the last parliament than ever Andrew Mackay managed. We don’t know yet whether Ottaway will withdraw, in favour of Swayne, or whether Swayne will simply aim to split the anti-leadership vote, and allow Ottaway through the middle, but the evidence tonight is overwhelming: all the blind, cack-handed panic that marked out Cameron’s grossly inept handling of the coalition negotiations has been brought right back into the open by this needless hysteria about the always dim possibility that Graham Brady might win the ’22 Chairmanship.
The most obvious sign of this has of course been the attempt to bounce the parliamentary party into dumping the historic rights of backbenchers, in favour of a tame payroll-whipped soviet. While a gross over-reaction to the prospect of Graham Brady has played it’s part – not least because, contrary to the Charles Moore/Bruce Anderson line, Cameron is a phenomenal grudge-bearer – making an effort to neuter the 1922 Committee was canvassed inside the leadership long before the general election result. True to their habitual vice of paying too much attention to what the media says, and therefore taking unwarranted fright at Brady’s always, in truth, slight chance of victory, this move may well have been rushed forward by the present press hype. But it’s still part and parcel of a knowingly fragile, yet nonetheless, still persistently inept leadership being determined to suppress discussion, let alone dissent.
Compare and contrast the dismal fate of Tory MPs this evening with their coalition partners. Lib Dem MPs have tonight been shown the full and final (public) coalition document: Tory MPs are having to beg favours from their newfound friends, as their leadership won’t tell them what’s in it before the vote on the ‘22’s franchise is out of the way. At the meeting of the parliamentary party this afternoon, Richard Ottaway, acting co-chairman of the 1922 Committee, knew what Cameron was going to say and supported it: whereas John Whittingdale, the other acting co-chairman, evidently only discovered what Cameron was going to say when he stood up and said it. Such needless factionalism from above is without precedent in the history of the parliamentary party, and is a grim sign of the trouble inescapably ahead. Cash, Brady, Binley and Bone all voiced the legitimate outrage genuinely independent backbenchers feel, but they’re all old hands. The freshman MPs, especially those celebrated for their apolitical or even non-political backgrounds have very little idea what the cynical purpose of the leadership is in trying to let the payroll vote too. And most lamentably of all, the ballot is actually being conducted by whips, with all that entails for confidence in the poll itself. Chris Chope is leading the midnight effort to fight back, but the stitch-up is already almost done.
All that’s wrong with David Cameron’s leadership of the Tory Party is contained in this one gruesome episode: the petulant dislike of critics and criticism; the frantic and paranoid response to them; and, the invariably counter-productive consequences of this wearisome trait. For even if the formal 1922 is indeed, for the remainder of David Cameron’s leadership, turned into a Pom Pom squad, all that’s going to do is lead to the formation of a shadow 1922 Committee. And however many members, openly or covertly subscribe to this provisional ’22, it unavoidably means that Cameron will have added yet more poison to the body of the Tory Party.
Graham Brady as Chairman was no threat: his every action since Cameron’s senseless and vindictive over-reaction to Grammar Schools has shown that. Brady is not a troublemaker, and a leader who wished for honest counsel should have known that. The trouble is, Cameron neither wants nor gets honest advice. The tragedy is, it’s increasingly obvious that he doesn’t deserve it either.