When the Tories announced a leadership contest stretching far out into the autumn, many of their grassroots supporters were suspicious of some kind of stitch-up to deny the party membership the deciding vote. I use the term “supporters” here cautiously; for many of them, naked contempt probably more accurately sums up their sentiments toward the party leadership than support.  

This was back in early July, when what was left of the leadership was still reeling from the unexpected success of their triple-digit haul of seats at the General Election. But credit where it’s due; at the time of writing, Conservative HQ seems to have resisted the urge to interfere in the outcome of the interminable leadership election, and Rishi Sunak has confounded the sceptics by remaining in Westminster as caretaker party leader, rather than relocating his young family to Palo Alto in time for the new school year. In fact Mr. Sunak, whom some readers may recall was prime minister, has instilled in the post of Leader of HM’s Loyal Opposition an air of serenity and aloofness unknown since the twilight of Douglas-Home’s time in the role. 

This probably reflects the assumption of senior Tories in the wake of the election that the incoming government, carried aloft on its great parliamentary majority, would govern the country on autopilot though the traditional summer silly-season, leaving the leadership contenders space to thrash about in the party’s irreconcilable ideological faultline one last time. If so, they couldn’t have been more wrong. Instead, the country has been wrenched by one of its nastiest and most visceral spasms of unrest in decades, and the new government is on the ropes. 

The Prime Minister carries the weight of a couple of decades more experience in public life than his predecessor, and whatever one may think of his political instincts, he seems to have a sense of the gravity of the moment. But for now, he looks less like the master of his fate than yet another object of the political and practical forces at play. 

Those forces at play can be summarised (rather crudely) as follows: 

1. Approximately once a week or so, there is a frenzied knife attack against innocent victims selected apparently at random. The perpetrator is invariably either an immigrant themselves, or the child of immigrants, and the fact that they were at large to carry out the attack generally reveals some inexplicable failure by the asylum, criminal justice, or mental healthcare systems.
2. Despite a lull in physical manifestations following heavy police responses and widely publicised prosecutions with harsh sentencing, there is palpable grievance among a large swathe of the white working class population at the failures above, exacerbated by the sense that the authorities have responded disproportionately (especially compared with their apparent nonchalance toward ordinary crime). The Government is keenly aware that disorder and the threat of intercommunal violence is bubbling just below the surface, and that each fresh outrage risks triggering another outbreak of rioting.
3. The prisons are full and the police are overstretched. These facts reflect most poorly on the previous government, but they force the government to make difficult decisions about what category of convict to prioritise for precious prison spaces. The government needs to make a show of punishing those involved with physical disorder swiftly, pour encourager les autres, but it seems highly likely that releasing dangerous prisoners early will lead directly and obviously to the sort of incidents that might trigger more public unrest, and a further deterioration of trust in the authorities and the criminal justice system. A good number of the offenders who will be released early are likely to be foreign nationals convicted of violent offences, yet whom the government will nevertheless have a hard time deporting; the optics of letting such people out to make room for people of previous good character  convicted of communications offences (i.e. Facebook posts) are clearly awful for the prime minister.
4. In addition to the above dynamic, there have also been cases of rioting or the threat of it from minority communities; most recently shows of defiance against the threat from the far right, but also last month by Roma travellers and their South Asian neighbours in Leeds, and by the Muslim community in Manchester following an incident at the airport. These of course follow almost a year of large-scale demonstrations related to the Israel-Hamas conflict, which have seen frequent outbreaks of trouble and have often been intimidatory in nature. These have mainly been policed in a light-touch manner designed to placate community tensions, for the simple reason that neither the police nor the criminal justice system have the capacity or the motivation to provoke Britain’s various minority communities into throwing their collective weight around on the streets.
5. The Prime Minister’s core political constituency clearly regards the disorder as an opportunity to assert its authority over an unruly public, and to set firm boundaries on public discourse and the limits of acceptable thought. This constituency may be small, but it includes a lot of people in positions of authority, and with substantial media reach. Whilst this group does favour harsh sentences for the physical disorder seen on the streets, their main hang-up relates to online speech, to which they ascribe almost supernatural powers of influence over real-world human behaviour. 

Readers will note among these array of factors and forces acting upon and influencing our prime minister, the absence of the official opposition. Plainly, this is a failure; even in their numerically reduced state, the British constitution functions on the basis of an alternative government in place, supposedly ready to step in the moment the incumbent administration loses the confidence of the House. Even at times like these when that is practically a mathematical impossibility, the role of the opposition, and especially its leader, is to provide a critical commentary on what the government is doing, and to set out alternatives. This should theoretically push the government away from doing things that are obviously wrong for the nation as a whole but politically expedient for the government’s network of institutional clients and special interest groups. At the very least, it should be able to alter the balance of what is politically expedient.

Obviously, and understandably, there will be a huge degree of cynicism about anything a new Tory leader has to say on any of these issues. The shortage of prison spaces, the chronic underfunding and understaffing of the police, the evident deterioration in the quality of police leadership, the great degree of public discontent at the failure of the government to protect the nation’s borders, and the unwillingness of the authorities to deport people who have no right to be in the country and who posed a clear threat to the public are all issues that the Conservatives could and should have addressed in their 14 long years in power.  

However, even in the absence a credible plan to address the chronic failure of state capacity and authority of which these problems are all symptoms, any leader of the opposition should be able to to make the point land that letting out obviously unrehabilitated, violent convicts only months into their sentences is the worst possible response to the shortage of prison space. Especially if this is being done to make room for people being handed down long sentences for Facebook posts. It’s a prime example of an organisation responding to shortages by cutting its most critical function. 

Furthermore, the government is being dragged firmly to one side on the subject of police direction and strategy. Without a credible opposition leader across the dispatch box, the PM is able to dismiss the accusation of “two tier” policing as paranoid conspiracy theory, whereas among a large section of the public, probably a majority, it seems almost an incontrovertible fact. The truth is that in this situation, a two-tier approach to policing is almost inevitable; the police would not be able to withstand a national revolt by a disaffected working or low-middle class movement. Frightening off as many as possible with heavy, swift sentences was the only option left to prevent the troubles of late July snowballing into something far more dangerous. And yet, a real opposition leader might still have been able to lend what are in fact very widely-shared concerns among the public some official credibility from parliament. Perhaps it might have been enough to make the police question whether it was wise in the current climate to be seen dancing in the street with revellers celebrating Pakistan’s independence day? 

But rather than an opposition leader who might gently remind the prime minister of the country that exists beyond SW1, he instead finds himself looking at the agreeable visage of Rishi Sunak, whose commitment in these scenarios is primarily to good taste and decency, rather than sobering political reminders. The same Rishi Sunak whom everyone knows had the chance, and the parliamentary majority, to deal with any of these problems, and blew it. Frankly, one can hardly blame him for holding his tongue. 

The Tories’ indulgently long leadership campaign means that none of the proper work of official opposition is happening

This effectively leaves the role of de facto opposition leader to Nigel Farage. Farage is a campaigning politician who leads a cohort of five MPs — his objective now is to change the political weather by appealing to a critical 25 per cent of the electorate, with a view to increasing Reform UK’s seat haul from five to five dozen at the next election. He is an expert at making his voice heard, and in antagonising the British establishment; he is also a polarising figure and is deeply unpopular with around a third of the electorate (who also make up Labour’s base). This ends up meaning that his campaigning for and lending his voice to certain positions ultimately forces the Labour government to tack even harder against them and, in the eyes of establishment figures, reinforces those positions as being on the fringes of debate, or conspiracy theory. 

The Tories’ indulgently long leadership campaign means that none of the proper work of official opposition is happening. If Keir Starmer knew that Robert Jenrick or Kemi Badenoch were due on the radio or the Sunday political slots every week, the government may have been forced into some more defensible positions in time for the end of Summer Recess. Instead, the media largely ignores the Conservative leadership race, which still has months left to run and will be between two of six potential candidates. Rather than face a fresh and ready opponent across the dispatch box next month, Sir Keir Starmer will be able to raise a patrician eyebrow over the ungainly goings on as the benches opposite finally gear themselves up to whittling the six down to two. And by the time his new opponent finally appears before him, he will likely have his first major crisis firmly behind him, with a number of serious policy errors just as firmly locked in. 

So not only have the Conservatives either exacerbated or caused most of the country’s serious long-term problems over the last 14 years, they will also have neglected their first critical months in opposition. Perhaps the Prime Minister really is so short-sighted that he thinks letting killers and rapists out early is a good idea, or that the police losing their reputation for even-handedness is something that will just work itself out. But the Tories won’t be able to claim that they told him not to. Instead, they have left him playing to a gallery of his own most ghastly supporters.