Tory MPs voting tactically? It’s nothing new.
It was the outcome nobody expected. But was it the result of tactical voting? It wouldn't be the first time.
Since Attlee & Churchill is currently running a series of articles on Conservative leadership elections. You can read about the first ever Tory leadership election in 1965 here; the 1975 battle for the Tory crown here; and the 1989 challenge to Margaret Thatcher’s leadership here. In this post, we look at the role tactical voting may have played in the current leadership contest and hunt down precedents from the past.
Image: The Conservative Party
Tory MPs voting tactically? It’s nothing new.
by Lee David Evans
Conservative Party politics has had more than its fair share of jaw-dropping moments, but few could match the fourth and final MPs’ ballot on Wednesday. In the previous round James Cleverly, the former Foreign and Home Secretary, had secured 39 votes from his colleagues. Just one more would guarantee him a place in the final. With the 20 votes previously committed to Tom Tugendhat up for grabs, Cleverly’s place in the final two was as close to a safe bet as it was possible to imagine.
And then: shock. When Bob Blackman, the new Chairman of the 1922 Committee, announced the results the unthinkable had happened. Not only had Cleverly failed to gain the single extra vote needed, he had lost two. In some circumstances, 37 MPs would still have been enough to make the final. If, for example, the leading candidate had attracted 50 votes, then with 120 MPs voting 37 for Cleverly would have left just 33 for the other rival. But neither Kemi Badenoch nor Robert Jenrick did so well as to save Cleverly; with 42 and 41 votes respectively, they knocked him out of the contest. Badenoch and Jenrick will now go forward to the ballot of Conservative Party members.
So what happened? The finger of blame has been pointed in several directions, but the common accusation is tactical voting gone wrong. Whilst some accuse the Cleverly campaign of lending votes to try and set up a preferred run-off against Jenrick, freelancing among Cleverly supporters, rather than the coordinated lending of votes, is the most likely culprit. (A coordinated effort backfiring so badly would, to put it politely, require too much incompetence to be believable). If it was a case of individual Cleverly-supporting MPs being ‘too clever by half’, we may never know what happened for sure. After all, who would want to confess to denying their candidate a place in the final?
Tactical voting has a long history in Conservative leadership contests. In fact, it’s hard to find a contest without it. Back in 1975, when Margaret Thatcher challenged Edward Heath for the premiership, the Thatcher campaign needed all the support it could get. As I’ve written elsewhere, Airey Neave, Thatcher’s campaign manager:
… needed to unite two camps of people: those who wanted Thatcher as leader, which before the first ballot represented less than a majority of Tory MPs, and those who wanted Heath out but did not want Thatcher in. His strategy was to use a vote for Thatcher in round one as a means of removing Heath and little more. Vote for her, he said, and there would be a second round in which other candidates could enter the fray. But if you want round two, you have to vote for her in round one.
It was an explicit appeal for tactical votes - and it worked. It’s estimated that as many as 40 MPs voted for Thatcher in spite of wanting an alternative leader. Having done so, and forced out Heath, they found that they had given her such success in the first ballot that the Thatcher juggernaut was unstoppable. She went on to lead the party for over fifteen years.
The circumstances of Thatcher’s downfall in 1990 saw the tables turned. This time, Conservative MPs who wanted rid of her were encouraged to vote for Michael Heseltine, whether they wanted him or not, to force her out. The thinking was identical: if they backed Heseltine, they could then support another candidate in the second round; but if they didn’t, she may do so well that there wouldn’t be another vote. It was a finely balanced judgement for Tory MPs but one, in this case, that MPs who were both anti-Thatcher and anti-Heseltine got right. The result was wounding enough to remove her from office, but not so good for Heseltine that it put him in. Instead, former Foreign Secretary and Chancellor John Major took the helm. Their tactical voting proved astute.
Removing the incumbent leader under the old Tory rules has been one motivation for tactical voting. But it isn’t the only one. On other occasions, MPs have tried to influence who has been the flag carrier for each wing of the party. In 1997, the last contest solely decided by MPs, it was alleged that some Ken Clarke supporters voted for John Redwood in the belief he was the least plausible candidate of the right. Up against him, they supposed, even Eurosceptic Tory MPs would vote for avid Europhile Clarke. If that accusation is right, it could explain why Redwood did better than expected in the first round of voting, coming third. But it wasn’t enough to generate the Clarke vs Redwood contest they hoped for. Instead, Clarke faced William Hague - and lost.
Since 1998, the dynamics of Conservative leadership contests have changed: MPs now whittle down the candidates to just two before members vote. The chief consideration for tactical voters is the possible head-to-head finals, with the supposed (and often polled) preferences of the members influencing who candidates want to face in the run-off. Depending on how sure they are of making the final two, the frontrunner among MPs may feel they can lend votes to the person they wish to be pitted against.
Allegations of such underhandedness peaked in 2019 when Boris Johnson, the overwhelming choice of Conservative MPs to lead the party after Theresa May, was accused of lending votes to Jeremy Hunt (a former Remainer) to keep Michael Gove (a Leaver) out of the battle to ‘get Brexit done.’ The rumours have been denied, but few doubt that going up against Hunt helped Johnson to win. As he says in his own recently published memoirs:
Jeremy had many things going for him: decent, very able, son of an admiral. But he has voted to remain in the EU, and it was obvious, after three years of stasis, that the government should be led by someone who actually believed in the [Brexit] project.
Tory members agreed.
Tactical voting, coordinated or otherwise, is nothing new in Conservative leadership contests. But, if it is what imploded Cleverly’s campaign last week, it has rarely had such dramatic - and, for the then frontrunner, catastrophic - consequences. Aspiring leaders in the future would be well-advised to always try to maximise their momentum and get as many votes as they can. It would probably do them more good - and at least keep them in the fight.
Like this post? Click the ‘heart’ below to help other people find it on Substack. Please also feel free to share this post with anyone you think may be interested.
The Parliamentary stage of the Clarke-Portillo-IDS contest of 2001 may have been determined by a small number of MPs switching to IDS from Portillo when it became apparent that stories about Portillo's youthful exuberance were doing him heavy damage. If this happened it would be an example of tactical voting working to ensure that the less unattractive right wing candidate faced off against Clarke.
Historians are still arguing over the Baldwin-Curzon choice by King George V a hundred years on. If in a century's time this little spat will be noted, it will surely be because it reinforces D R Thorpe's assessment in Supermac of the 1963 choice of Alec Home by showing just how difficult it is to work out what Conservative MPs actually want when choosing a leader and how important "I do not want X at any price" can be.
The pre-1965 system of relying on some sort of consensus to emerge with somebody (George V in 1924, Salisbury & Kilmuir in 1957 and Macmillan in 1963) playing the part of the Sybil gave great weight to negative opinions. Rab Butler in particular suffered from a great deal of hostility among backbench MPs - the Chairman of 1922 told him "the chaps won't have you". During the 1963 soundings, reports came in suggesting that women quite strongly opposed to him. Reports from Blackpool convinced Macmillan that Hailsham/Hogg had made too many enemies to be acceptable.
Although in 1957 the famous polling of the cabinet by Salisbury and Kilmuir produced a clear majority for Macmillan (there was no such clarity as to a first choice among the 1963 cabinet) soundings were also made of MPs and the party membership (or at least its senior leadership in the National Union). Importantly these sounding showed that what was regarded as left (one nation) MPs were willing to accept Macmillan.
Thorpe's assessment is that in 1963 Macmillan really did do no more than weigh up the reports which he received of the preferences of cabinet minsters, of MPs and the party membership. Some glaring errors have come to light - for instance Lord Chancellor Dilhorne's polling of the cabinet showed Boyle as favouring Alec Home when he supported Butler - but nobody has cast doubt on the hostility expressed against both Butler and Hailsham or the widespread (although famously not universal) willingness to accept Alec Home as Prime Minister.
This week's events shows the defect in a system which only allows positive votes compared t the pre-1965 system. Of course that was not flawless. Later in life both Macmillan and Home were to say that maybe Butler should have become PM - anything else looked somewhat unnatural they thought - they also thought that Butler would have won the 1964 election.
FOOTNOTE ON MUNICH AND 1963
The importance of Munich is too often downplayed; Butler, Macmillan, Home, Hailsham/Hogg and Heath had all played a prominent part either in the event itself or in the acrimonious Conservative conflicts that resulted, especially the Oxford "Munich" by-election; a number of MPs in 1963 had as undergraduates taken part in that - e..g. Hugh Fraser, Maurice Macmillan, Julian Amery.