David Cameron's third-term renunciation is an act of weakness
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Version 0 of 1. Prime ministers don’t like talking about resigning or retiring, least of all when they are running for re-election. Thus, when a prime minister does talk about quitting, he does it for a reason and because he thinks he is in a tight spot. So, to what question is Cameron’s surprise mid-campaign announcement that he will not run for a third term the answer? The explanation lies in internal Conservative party politics. Not for the first time in his leadership, Cameron’s action is a reminder of the importance he attaches to managing his often angry party. As the Guardian reported at the weekend, Cameron is worried about a leadership challenge after 7 May if the Conservatives fail to win a decisive lead in seats. His supporters have been contacting loyalists to ask them to form a “praetorian guard” around the prime minister to prevent a challenge. Cameron’s BBC interview with James Landale on Monday makes a kind of sense as part of that process too. It is an act of weakness – an admission that his command of the Tory party remains flimsier than outsiders imagine or than the polls would suggest. But its purpose is pre-emptive. It is an attempt to win time, by drawing the immediate sting out of a poor election result. It tells Tory MPs – who are the only people other than Cameron with the power to set a leadership contest in motion – that they should bide their time because Cameron is going anyway. It says the turbulent days after the election of a hung parliament – in which Tory backbenchers have demanded a say over the outcome – are the wrong time to challenge a leader who may nevertheless still have a good chance of forming the next government. But it tells those MPs they will get their chance before 2020, the scheduled date of the next general election. It is also an attempt to help George Osborne, Cameron’s closest ally among the likely challengers, and the strongest moderniser in a field heavily skewed towards the party’s rightwing. Cameron – and, we can assume, Osborne – are clearly more desperate than they appear from the outside to remain in control of the succession process in a party that loves to plot. Crucial to their calculations is the way the Tory party chooses its leaders. In the Tory process, MPs ballot among the possible candidates until they get the field down to the last two. The party membership then votes between the final two, as happened in 2005 when Cameron defeated David Davis. So the real challenge when the race to succeed Cameron gets under way is to get into the last two. That is surely why Cameron was careful to mention three possible successors: Theresa May, Boris Johnson and Osborne (a choice that will not have gone down well with Philip Hammond, Liam Fox, Sajid Javid or any others who fancy their chances). From Cameron’s and Osborne’s point of view, the last thing they want is an early election in which the party membership, angry at the failure to win power, seizes the chance to elect Johnson. This is what underlies Cameron’s comments. Cameron has said he will serve a full second term if elected. This is nonsense. The British political system is not set up to permit this to happen. The approaching election in 2020 would gradually take greater precedence than the outgoing leader’s wish to remain in office until the death. The reality now has to be that Cameron – if he wins a second term in May – will not stay until 2020 but will go in 2018/19, probably after the EU referendum to which the next Cameron government would be committed. Having renounced a third term, Cameron cannot lead the party into the 2020 election, so he will have to give his successor a year in which to reshape the party for the election contest. Cameron would not have discussed his departure if he did not feel under pressure. There is no getting away from the fact that the announcement will come at a price, even if he succeeds in controlling the timetable in the way that he seeks. That price is the legitimation of the battle to succeed him, which will grow ever noisier and more consuming as the months and years pass. That succession contest was already quietly and sometimes not so quietly under way anyway. Tory websites and bloggers can sometimes seem to talk of little else, and Conservative Home routinely polls its users for their favoured post-Cameron leader – normally May in recent months. Cameron’s announcement makes all this official. It fires the starting pistol on the search for a successor. It means that everything the favourites do will now be seen through the prism of the eventual contest to succeed. It means, for instance, that the formation of a new Cameron cabinet will be seen in that light: the departmental appointments of Osborne, May and, presumably, Johnson will have a huge bearing on the battle to come. Cameron has taken a big gamble. It is more a sign of weakness than of strength. He will be very fortunate if he pulls it off. |