Just 14 days have passed since Boris Johnson reluctantly announced his resignation as Conservative party leader. The 58-year-old will remain British Prime Minister until the beginning of September; now the two candidates who can be elected by party members as Johnson’s successor have been identified in internal voting procedures.
It is no coincidence that in the race to succeed Johnson there was a lot of talk about a loss of trust in politics. However, the candidates treated each other so rudely in a TV debate that another had to be canceled. The party headquarters probably feared permanent image damage.
Three things could be learned by those who watched the show running. Firstly, there was a fabulous variety that made many, by no means only conservative, parties in Europe pale. Six of the original eleven candidates are non-white; all four women, but only two men survived the first ballot.
This week left the Indian-born ex-finance minister Rishi Sunak and three women, including Kemi Badenoch, who grew up in Nigeria. The migrant child Sunak and a white woman, both in their forties, are now going into the primary. In comparison, the last leadership dispute of the CDU looked boring and old.
On the other hand, secondly, the election process is hopelessly outdated. Initially, 358 members of the House of Commons determine the candidate duo, then around 180,000 predominantly white, older, male party members living in southern England choose the new prime minister. Is that appropriate for the increasingly participatory society of the multicultural, multinational kingdom?
Third, after twelve years, the Tories have lost interest in governing. The country has enough serious problems: the climate crisis and global inflation, the deeply damaged relationship with the EU, the growing national debt, glaring social inequality, the crunching structure of the Union of England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland.
But there was hardly any talk of that, all the more of tax cuts that were at best economically dubious. Whoever hides in the ideologically pure right corner will soon lose power.
