Chris Skidmore has already announced he is standing down as a Conservative MP at the next general election because his Kingswood constituency has been abolished.
Half his seat would form a new constituency called North East Somerset and Hanham, which would have been safe Tory territory in normal times, but he did not try to stop there.
In possibly related news, last July, before announcing his withdrawal, he said Conservative Party members did not want to prioritize the government’s 2050 net zero targets because “90 per cent of them will die”.
Now Skidmore says he will stand down “as soon as possible” in protest at the government’s green policy that led to the by-election. It’s an empty gesture, given that the winner of the by-election, likely the Labor candidate, will only hold the seat for a few months. Having achieved swings of 21 per cent and 24 per cent in the by-elections in Mid Bedfordshire, Selby and Tamworth, Labor needs to swing only 12 per cent to win.
An empty move, but a counterproductive one. If Rishi Sunak had hoped that the Conservative Party’s prospects might begin to improve when he announced that the general election would likely be held in the second half of this year, he was quickly disappointed. Another by-election, in which Keir Starmer’s party could score another win reminiscent of the Blair landslide, is not what the Tory brand needs right now.
Sunak’s attempts to keep the party together, which included the desperate tactic of keeping Suella Braverman in the Home Office longer than seemed absolutely necessary, only postponed the breakup.
It is not just his long-standing enemies in the party who are trying to undermine Sunak at every opportunity, but also his old friends. Boris Johnson and Liz Truss were conspicuously unhelpful by voting against the new prime minister’s Windsor Framework for Northern Ireland trading rules within five months of Sunak’s appointment (although Johnson went out of his way to avoid vilifying his former chancellor in the Covid inquiry in). in what appears to be an unspoken, mutually assured non-subversion agreement).
As for Sunak’s old friends, Skidmore began backing him for the lead in the 2022 summer competition before moving on to Liz Truss. Truss rewarded him by appointing him to head the official review of policies aimed at achieving net zero.
Sunak punished him by not making him a minister and announcing a “proportionate and pragmatic” approach to climate change policies, which Skidmore also condemned. letter of resignation As “the biggest mistake of your Prime Ministry”.
Robert Jenrick was one of three mid-ranking ministers to write an article alongside Sunak and Oliver Dowden. Times Theresa May said in the final days of her premiership: “Only Boris Johnson can save us.” Last month, he lashed out at his ally, upset that he was not promoted to interior secretary when Braverman was sacked. Like Skidmore, he tried to wound Sunak on his way out, accusing him of supporting the Rwandan asylum policy that was “the triumph of hope over experience”. This was unfair because the policy Jenrick advocated in his resignation letter was unenforceable; Jenrick knows full well that there are around 100 Conservative MPs who will not vote for any legislation that explicitly rejects the European Court of Human Rights.
But that’s where the Conservative Party is at. Ministers who agree on the final outcome resign and accuse the prime minister of lacking willpower. And backbenchers like Skidmore are triggering a by-election that will push Starmer further into Downing Street.
There is a little paradox here; Skidmore must be well aware that Labour’s policies, although looking a bit greener on the surface, are ill-suited to making a real difference on climate change. Skidmore’s net zero report for the Truss government was produced extremely quickly, but the government could not hold out long enough to publish it, so Skidmore published it as a book. Mission Zero. It reveals the scale, complexity and therefore cost of achieving the goal in detail that both the government and the opposition avoid. Rachel Reeves’s shadow Treasury team will read this with a growing sense of panic.
But even those who are skeptical about the usefulness of electing a Labor government in the fight against climate change may gain some from Skidmore’s departure. Robin Walker, the Tory chairman of the education select committee, will no longer be confused with him; They look alike except Skidmore has a beard. And the rest of us can look forward to the “multi-volume biography of Henry VIII in the style of Robert Caro” that Skidmore, a distinguished historian of early modern England, promised 10 years ago.
But all Sunak can do is wait impatiently for things to fall apart. It seems the longer he delays the election, the worse things will get for the Conservatives.