Fewer and fewer Tory MPs are able to convince themselves that continuing to represent the party in parliament is worthwhile. Just shy of 50 Conservative members have said they will be standing down at the next general election, which is well over one-tenth of the party’s full body of current MPs.
Among these are a number of high-profile MPs. Defence Secretary Ben Wallace, easily the most popular cabinet minister at this time, announced earlier this month that he is quitting politics for good. After 18 years in parliament, he expressed his wish to do “something completely different,” adding that “I’m quite happy to go and work at a bar … I sometimes think I’d just like to go and do things I love, like Formula One or horse racing.”
Other big names who will soon be departing from Tory ranks include Sajid Javid, who has spent time as health secretary, home secretary, and, perhaps most significantly, chancellor; George Eustice, who described his former role as environment secretary as a “dream job,” but now seeks “the opportunity to do a final career outside politics”; and Charles Walker, who has, as The Mirror puts it, “been scathing of the recent chaos in the Tory party.”
He is not alone in feeling this way. The Conservative Party has been in government for 13 years but has little to show for this period in power. Social conservatives, including a portion of Tory MPs, are frustrated that after all this time, the party is producing the same lines as Labour on immigration, housing, crime, education, and more, with very little having been done in the way of action.
And with the party slumping in the polls, many Tory MPs are simply giving up and appear desperate to leave. This “exodus,” wrote Tim Shipman in the latest print edition of The Sunday Times, “has come to resemble rats leaving a sinking ship.”
This week’s by-election results, which saw the Tories lose two seats they previously held with comfortable majorities of about 20,000 and barely hold on to a third, where they still shed around 7,000 votes, are hardly likely to settle the nerves of Conservative MPs who are questioning their commitments to the party. The night was described as “bruising” for Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, and it is difficult to picture the situation becoming much more favourable.
Some senior Tory ministers are fearful of a “total clearout” of MPs ahead of the next election, party sources told The Guardian. The paper cited the “experience of Boris Johnson’s premiership, the increasing stresses of the job, and a continuing slump in the polls as reasons for a forthcoming bumper crop of departures.”
Mr. Sunak will undoubtedly be worried about this clear image of resignation among Tory MPs being visible among Tory voters generally and the wider voting public, and he has more than a large task on his hands if he is to reverse the tide.
