All this blue-on-blue Tory conflict is just handing Labour ammunition

The Tory party has been far from unified since Brexit – now they’re engaged in all-out fighting, writes Sean O’Grady

Rishi Sunak and Liz Truss face calls to do more for the poorest as the cost of living crisis mounts (PA)

It can be funny how things turn out, can’t it? A mere six or seven years ago David Cameron decided to hold the ill-fated EU referendum, reportedly muttering “I can do this” to those who urged prevarication and caution. When the referendum did get under way, Cameron then went to great lengths to try and prevent blue-on-blue conflict – that is, members of his own government laying into each other making the task of reunifying the party after he’d won the referendum much more difficult.

Fair to say it hasn’t turned out like that. The Conservatives are still banging on about Europe, and the leaders of the party are engaged in open fighting, often enough about personality as much as policy.

No matter how many times rival camps are urged to cool it and stop providing Labour with valuable future ammunition, they really cannot help themselves. The veritable circular flying squads just get up and start all over again, whether on TV, on the hustings stage or via the usual channels of spin and misinformation.

Indeed, the contenders and their allies often do a more effective job of destroying their opponents than the official opposition. Take the latest bombshell from Dominic Raab, deputy prime minister and Sunakite, deriding Liz Truss’s plans for a tax-cutting emergency budget as an “electoral suicide note”. I bet Rachel Reeves wishes she’d thought of that, but never mind, she will.

Raab is only echoing his chief, who ridiculed Truss’s “fairytale” economics early on in the contest, and has stuck to the same line about the inflationary risks of big unfunded tax cuts and spending plans.

Lobbing the shells back, Truss decries Sunak as a prisoner of a “stale Treasury orthodoxy”, a handy attack line for Labour if Sunak ever gets back into high office.

The candidates who dropped out before – but who must hope for top jobs in the cabinet – have also been rudely abused by their “colleagues”. Kemi Badenoch and Truss ganged up on Penny Mordaunt and made her out to be some kind of “woke” bastion of trans rights. David Frost, who worked with Mordaunt on Brexit basically called her “absent on parade”. Suella Braverman, an outside runner for the Home Office, actually, outrageously, accused Mordaunt of not being an “authentic Brexiteer”, as if they were all members of some religious cult. Boris Johnson, though formally schtum, has apparently made it known he regards Sunak as “treacherous”.

Would the Lib Dems like a handy quote for their next leaflet in the West Country? Here’s Mel Stride, Tory MP for Central Devon, on Twitter: “Truss note to editors on regional pay plan ‘this is the potential savings if the system were to be adopted for all public sector workers’. For [South West] that’s 512,558 nurses, teachers, police taking a pay cut – mostly women. Hardly levelling up. Will cost us seats in SW.”

But no matter how snide and snarly the rest of them can be, there is no more formidable a political warrior queen than Nadine Dorries, whose version of blue-on-blue attack is brutal. She is driven by a loyalty to Johnson not seen since the Branch Davidians went out of fashion. There was, for example, that retweet of Sunak as Brutus stabbing Johnson in the back, which prompted this concerned response from her fellow Tory, Greg Hands: “I’m sure Liz Truss would disown this kind of behaviour. I think this is appalling. Look, it’s not even a year since the stabbing of Sir David Amess at his Southend constituency surgery, so I think this is very, very bad taste, dangerous even … I do find it distasteful.”

In a slightly more restrained way, Dorries has conceded that she “may have gone slightly over the top” with her famous tweet comparing the chancellor’s suit and Prada shoes with Truss’s £4.50 earrings from Claire’s Accessories: “I wanted to highlight Rishi’s misguided sartorial style in order to alert Tory members not to be taken in by appearances in the way that happened to many of us who served with the chancellor in cabinet …The assassin’s gleaming smile, his gentle voice and even his diminutive stature had many of us well and truly fooled.”

Without a trace of irony the culture secretary added that the former chancellor “travelled along a path of treachery, and in doing so is unlikely to win the hearts and minds of Conservative party members because, above all else, they value loyalty and decency”.

In about a month’s time, some combination of Truss, Sunak, Stride, Hands, Braverman, Dorries, Mordaunt and Badenoch may find themselves sitting around the cabinet table, or at least trying to work together as they face a difficult general election. It’s going to be awkward.