A matter of confidence: a history of Conservative Party confidence votes

Reflecting on what has become one of the most famous aspects of Conservative Party leadership processes: the method of expressing confidence, or not, in the party's leader.

Picture: Boris Johnson speaking to the media after Conservative MPs expressed confidence in his leadership. June 2022. Credit: The Conservative Party

A matter of confidence: a history of Conservative Party confidence votes

by Lee David Evans

Few things unseen (and, presumably, unseeable) are as famous as Sir Graham Brady’s mailbag. Hundreds of thousands of words have been penned about its contents and the process it can trigger. The headlines tell a story of drama: ‘Tory MPs lie about submitting no confidence letters’, The Telegraph once reported. Whether claims to have submitted a letter demanding a vote on the leader are true or not, rumours can sometimes be sufficient to say that there is ‘Mounting speculation that the… letters are in’, in the words of The Spectator. Or even more assuredly, that there are ‘“Enough” Letters to Force… Leadership Vote’, as Business Insider reported in May 2022 - albeit with quotation marks that betray the uncertainty that surrounds a process about which nothing is truly knowable until the Chairman of the 1922 Committee, the role Brady has held since 2010, says so. 

The confidence vote, for all its notoriety, is a relatively novel device for the world’s oldest and most successful political party. Under the leadership rules implemented in the aftermath of the Conservatives’ landslide defeat in 1997, and which are still in place today, the confidence vote was introduced as one of two ways to bring about a leadership election. (The other is the leader’s resignation). Letters from just 15% of MPs to the Chairman of the 1922 Committee are enough to trigger a ballot; a simple majority is enough to fire the leader. 

Once it was introduced, MPs wasted little time in using their new tool of defenestration.