The latest instalment in the Worst Coup Attempt Ever just dropped

David Frost, Simon Clarke and Will Dry are the most clueless plotters since Mark Thatcher – Maggie’s son – got himself arrested for trying to overthrow the government in Equatorial Guinea, writes John Rentoul

I have seen some hopeless attempts to dislodge prime ministers in my time, but Simon Clarke and co take the cake, writes John Rentoul (Getty/PA/Alamy)

Mercenaries organised by Mark Thatcher, the former prime minister’s son, were arrested in Zimbabwe in 2004 before they could fly to Equatorial Guinea to try to oust President Mbasogo. The hopeless coup attempt was satirised in a comedy TV drama, but TV production companies are unlikely to be queueing up to buy the rights to the story of David Frost, Simon Clarke, Will Dry and their anonymous financier(s).

So far, their plot has consisted of publishing an opinion poll suggesting that the Conservatives might lose the election later this year; articles in The Daily Telegraph by Frost and Clarke saying that Rishi Sunak must go; and now a statement from Dry, who left his job as a special adviser in No 10 in November, saying the same thing.

The net result has been a chorus of abuse from Conservative MPs, reinforcing Sunak’s position but further undermining any hope the party might have of appearing united.

The plot has been so cack-handed that we shouldn’t be surprised if the shadowy donor behind the “Conservative Britain Alliance”, which paid for the poll, turned out to be a Labour supporter. The whole story might as well have been scripted in Keir Starmer’s office – including the line deployed by the Labour leader at Prime Minister’s Questions yesterday, in which he said Sunak was being “bullied” by his own party.

I have seen some hopeless attempts to dislodge prime ministers in my time. There was Anthony Meyer’s lonely challenge to Margaret Thatcher’s leadership in 1989, in which he attracted the votes of 33 Tory MPs. There was John Redwood’s challenge to John Major’s leadership in 1995, after Major demanded that his party “back me or sack me” and it chose to back him so unenthusiastically that he got the worst of both worlds.

There was James Purnell’s resignation from Gordon Brown’s cabinet in 2009 that was supposed to pave the way for David Miliband, who stood aloof from a plot in his name and about which he had not been consulted. And then there was the plan by Patricia Hewitt and Geoff Hoon to try to get Brown out four months before the 2010 election, which fizzled out within hours of going public.

None of these was quite as hopeless as today’s Baldrick-style cunning plan. Indeed, by contrast, all of them had a good rationale. Meyer’s “stalking donkey” challenge to Thatcher was derided, but he punctured the myth of her invincibility and exposed the flimsiness of Tory leadership election rules, which then required a candidate to be nominated and seconded by just two anonymous MPs. She was ousted a year later.

Redwood was right that a better leader than Major could have reduced Tory losses at the 1997 election – but that leader was Michael Heseltine, whom Major bought off by making him deputy prime minister. And Purnell, Hewitt and Hoon were probably right that Labour would have done better in the 2010 election if Alan Johnson or David Miliband had been prime minister, but neither Johnson nor Miliband was dementedly ambitious enough to try to seize the crown.

The Conservative Britain Alliance putsch has all the drawbacks of these failed coups and none of the positives. Its advocates cannot say who would be a better prime minister than Sunak. Frost and Clarke were both supporters of Boris Johnson, who might have had Heseltinian charisma (he once described himself as a “Brexity Hezza”), but he has blown it now and, anyway, he is no longer an MP.

Dry’s statement offers no clue as to who he thinks could save the Conservatives from “the most almighty of defeats”. Nor does his past as a Leave voter who campaigned for a second EU referendum, setting up a youth organisation called OFOC, Our Future Our Choice.

You cannot beat someone with no one, and that was the problem with each of the failed coups I have listed. Redwood at least offered himself as the candidate, but he was the wrong one. It was the problem of the (successful) challenge to Boris Johnson’s leadership in 2022: when Sunak resigned as chancellor, along with a host of other cabinet ministers, they were united in wanting to get Johnson out, but they hadn’t made sure that they could get Sunak in – and the result was a worse disaster for the Tory party than if Johnson had continued as prime minister.

The Conservative Britain Alliance coup falls at this first hurdle – its ringleaders being rounded up, metaphorically, in Zimbabwe before they have even got on the plane. The absence of an alternative leader was made comically obvious by the seat-by-seat opinion poll it commissioned. A question apparently drafted by Dry, who was an adviser on opinion research in Sunak’s No 10, asked people who they would prefer as prime minister: Starmer or an imaginary Conservative prime minister who had made all kinds of popular but impossible or contradictory changes.

It is one of the longest hypothetical questions ever asked in a British poll. In full, it reads: “Please imagine that we are well into 2024, and the next UK general election is being held. Suppose by this time, the Conservatives had replaced Rishi Sunak and elected a new leader and prime minister, and they had made the following changes: taking a much tougher approach on people coming to the UK illegally on small boats from France; introducing tough new measures on crime and anti-social behaviour; new measures which significantly reduced legal migration; bringing in new tax cuts for working people; successfully getting waiting times for operations with the NHS falling.

“In this hypothetical election, which of the following would you prefer to be prime minister? The new Conservative leader; Keir Starmer; not sure.”

Unsurprisingly, more people preferred the mythical paragon to a real Labour politician, which proved precisely nothing. It may be that Dry had the idea of doing a seat-by-seat survey, known as an MRP (multilevel regression and post-stratification) poll, from his time in the second referendum campaign, which used this kind of polling to try to encourage constituency-level tactical voting.

The Conservative Britain Alliance poll was effective in scaring many Tory MPs into thinking that they will lose their seats, by making clearer what the current national polls suggest in each constituency, but it was a miserable failure in mobilising that fear behind an effective revolt against Sunak’s leadership.

If there was a prize for the Worst Coup Attempt Ever, awarding extra points for futility and counterproductive damage done to the cause the coup leaders were trying to promote, then Frost, Clarke and Dry should be declared joint winners of the Mark Thatcher Trophy.