Having deposed four prime ministers in less than eight years, the Conservative Party is no stranger to friendly fire.
But former cabinet minister Simon Clarke’s Telegraph op-ed, declaring that the party “will be massacred” at the next general election if Rishi Sunak remains in charge, was notable not just for its content but also for its placement.
The Telegraph has long been known as the Conservatives’ “de facto house journal”, said Peter Walker in The Guardian. But the op-ed, along with the publication of a YouGov poll that projected the number of Tory MPs would fall from 350 to just 169, takes the newspaper’s role in “manoeuvrings to undermine Rishi Sunak” one step further, said Walker. The Telegraph is now hoping to “reshape the party in its ideological image”.
‘The Telegraph assault’
Lord Frost – a “trenchant critic of Sunak”, according to Andrew Marr in The New Statesman – “wrote about the ‘stunningly awful’ numbers” in The Telegraph himself and noted he had played a role in shaping and analysing the survey. Frost is “fronting” the Conservative Britain Alliance, which “appears to be a paper fig leaf”, said Marr, for a group of donors campaigning on a tougher stance on immigration to “avoid a potential ‘extinction event'” at the hands of Reform UK.
What’s “really revealing”, said the Financial Times‘s associate editor Stephen Bush, is that not only is The Telegraph “not on side with the prime minister in an election year” but that it “has run a no-holds-barred attack”.
“The Telegraph assault”, as Marr called it, centred on the “unusually large and detailed polling sample” broken down by constituency. That makes it “particularly corrosive” when MPs and cabinet ministers are “speculating on the likelihood of their personal defeats”.
It’s clear The Telegraph “is willing to make trouble for him [Sunak] and to undermine him”, said the FT’s Bush. “That is going to be a running sore for Sunak all the way until the election.”
‘Hacking off a protective arm’
As for why this particular brand of blue-on-blue attack is happening, there are suggestions it’s connected to the “murky business” of The Telegraph and its sister title The Spectator “being in the middle of a tortuous sale process” to a United Arab Emirates (UAE) consortium, according to Reaction.
With the publications stuck in “ownership limbo”, the Tories are “splitting in both directions”, Marr said in The New Statesman. On one side, Thatcher-era ministers are coming out against the sale, but others, including former cabinet minister and party chairman Nadhim Zahawi, are “working with the Emiratis” to recruit other key figures to an advisory board.
That The Telegraph is going “out of its way to whack” Sunak is “less biting the hand that feeds it, more hacking off a protective arm”, said Marr.
Whitehall is “awash with rumours” that the government wants the UAE deal to go ahead because “the country needs foreign investment too much”, said Reaction.
The Telegraph’s recent coverage of Sunak has also been accompanied by an in-depth account of Foreign Secretary David Cameron’s “closeness to the UAE leadership”. It’s almost as if the newspaper is saying it “won’t go quietly this year” if the UAE ultimately wins its battle to take it over.
The Telegraph launches ‘assault’ on PM just as many Tory MPs are contemplating losing their seats
