It’s the endless self-congratulation that’s most depressing – they actually thought this was clever. They thought it was a swift move to suddenly summon all MPs present in Westminster to a meeting where most of them expected to be told details of the finalised, full coalition document. Instead, astonished Conservative MPs were told by their leader that he wanted to denude them of a right they have had for almost a century: the right to represent themselves against ministers when the party is in government. And once Cameron has told them this startling, equally uncanvassed and uncalled for piece of news, he actually had his whips open the ballot boxes within half an hour of the meeting of the parliamentary party being closed. The sad thing is, it’s entirely possible that the low opinion Cameron has of ‘his’ MPs may well be justified later today when we know the result.
Of some of Tory MPs, it is, of course, difficult to have too low an opinion. Take the toad-eating, office-seeking John Hayes for example. That natural supplicants of the leadership like Peter Luff and Richard Ottaway stood up yesterday afternoon and loyally supported whatever it was Cameron chose to say to them is hardly unreasonable: you may as well expect dogs not to wag their tails. However, that Hayes, with seeming sincerity, struggled to his feet and gasped that Cameron’s proposed measure was, after all, only what the PLP did, and that we should take a leaf out of the book of the left, was certainly a lesson straight from the political venality of Blairite junior ministerial careerists. But the shamelessness of newfound ministers of the crown went all the way to the top, as the Prime Minister’s speech effortlessly demonstrated.
Even the heir to Blair tropes such as the grisly business of taking off his jacket before he started speaking pall beside what Cameron affected to believe: that we were ‘one party’, and that we had to avoid the ‘divisions’ of the past, and that he didn’t want the ‘difficulties’ of the 90s to be those of the 2010s. Hence his decision to try and bounce new Tory MPs into giving up the rights customarily theirs, and the rights any Tory worthy of the name would recognise as not merely being traditional, but also practical and pragmatic. A 1922 Committee, as historically constituted, serves the excellent function of diffusing tension within the parliamentary party, and mediating between followers and leader. Again and again, it’s the sheer senselessness of this self-harming move that presses in upon us. Purely for the absurdly short-termist sake of supposedly avoiding a few headlines which might have touched upon some slight, veiled, indirect criticism of him, Cameron is attempting to get rid of a mechanism which every historical precedent suggests actually helps buttress the leader’s position.
That David Cameron has connived at the Liberals’ efforts to hold on to multi-million pound public subventions, always set out as being for the purpose of opposition parties being able to compensate thereby for governing parties having access to the resources of the civil service, and wished to rush this change to the rules of the 1922 through before this fact was widely known confirms every worst suspicion it is possible for the Right to have had of him. ‘Cameron’s Government’ should rapidly replace the vainglorious ‘Cameron’s Conservatives’ because this government has precious little to do with Toryism.