Is it ego or a battle of ideas that tempts politicians into guerrilla warfare?

The Tories hate infighting for a good reason – and it should worry Labour too

This infighting isn’t just a Tory phenomenon though (AFP/Getty)

“I want to run away and hide.” That’s what one senior Conservative MP told me when I called him in the hours before Boris Johnson’s confidence vote.

While some Tories relish the drama, the sheer “sturm und drang” of the whole business, others feel sick to the stomach about it. They know divided parties don’t tend to win elections for one thing. And in the strange world of Westminster politics, blue on blue warfare feels a bit like fratricide.

Senior Tory – and former vice-chair of the 1922 committee – Sir Charles Walker told me on Channel 4 News this week that he feared his beloved party was heading for “guerilla warfare”. With Johnson clinging on to power, this could go on for months if not years.

It’s a familiar pattern.

I remember so clearly in 2003 the venom Tory MPs spat at their leader Iain Duncan Smith. One compared him to a lump of lard. They couldn’t wait to get rid of him and two years after he was elected leader, they dispatched him. Cast your mind further back and you have John Major, driven to distraction by the Eurosceptic “bastards” in his party, as he called them, (Duncan Smith among them ironically).

On both occasions, that warfare cost the Conservatives power. Major lost the election to a Labour landslide; Duncan Smith became the first Tory leader since Neville Chamberlain not to lead his party into a general election.

This infighting isn’t just a Tory phenomenon though. Fratricide was a metaphor made virtually real by the Miliband brothers. Neil Kinnock’s Herculean struggle with the Militant tendency has become the stuff of Labour legend. And the Blair/Brown strife was a civil war which still reverberates to this day. In all of these instances, voters took a dim view and punished the party at the ballot box.

What is it about politics, though, which makes people from the same tribe tear each other apart? Perhaps ego and ambition have a part to play. This was no doubt what the culture secretary Nadine Dorries had in mind when she roasted former health secretary Jeremy Hunt on Twitter this week. I’m sure he’s still got designs on the top job, but in the great pantheon of political egos, I’ve never placed him at the pinnacle.

A more benign interpretation of the Westminster wars is that these are passionate people engaging in a noble battle of ideas. Maybe it’s only in the furnace of conflict that politicians can remould the country in the way they see fit. Witness Margaret Thatcher as she strove to turn her vision of a free market economy into reality, in the face of opposition from the unions. Likewise, Neil Kinnock saw opposition to Militant and the hard left as an essential conflict to make Labour electable again, and transform Britain’s public services.

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And if Brexit is ever to be a success – and that’s some way in the future if the official budget watchdog is proven right about the economic hit – Conservatives will presumably argue that decades of internecine warfare over Europe was a price worth paying. Some – like the Maastricht rebels of years gone by – relish the fight. Others would quite like to step out of the trenches for a glimpse of the sunlit uplands their leader used to muse about.

One told me ruefully: “If Labour could have picked the numbers it would have picked Monday night’s.” Johnson is now a lame-duck prime minister and in theory, all the opposition needs to do now is take aim.

But if Labour MPs are feeling smug that their years of bickering under Jeremy Corbyn are behind them, they should think again. There’s a reasonable chance the Tories could spend the next year slugging it out, only to alight on a shiny new Messiah before the next general election – though none of the potential candidates can turn water into wine, let alone walk on water. But if they time it right, they could see an outbreak of peace under a new leader.

Then it will be Labour at each other’s throats once again.

Cathy Newman is presenter and investigations editor of Channel 4 News