We are currently just under four weeks into the UK Conservative Party’s leadership election. Ruminating on this, I remembered that when I was a university student in the UK, a friend once told me that in terms of its structure, the UK Conservative Party “has more in common with the Communist Party of the Soviet Union than any American political party.” He was of course exaggerating, but his words touched on something that was and is basically true: by and large, European and especially British political parties are vastly more centralized and disciplined than their American counterparts. There are a number of reasons for this, but I want to use the case of Boris Johnson’s departure to a highlight a specific yet very important dimension of this sharp contrast.
The UK Conservative Party consists of three branches. The “voluntary party” consists of the various local and regional associations of party activists along with the rank-and-file members. The “professional party” is the bureaucracy of the Conservative Party and manages the day-to-day administration of the party as a whole. The “parliamentary” or “political party” refers to the actual sitting Conservative members of Parliament.
I want to focus on this last group, but it is worth mentioning that the Conservative Party Board leads the three branches of the Conservative Party, with members from each branch. The Party Board acts as a sort of central committee and wields an enormous amount of power over most of the rest of the party. For example, instead of having primaries, the various local Conservative associations are required to pick their candidates from an approved list assembled by the Party Board. Contrast this with either of the two main US parties, both of which rely on primary elections to determine their candidates with comparatively little in the way of direct intervention from the national or even state parties.
However, when it comes to Boris Johnson, we need to look more closely at the parliamentary party. The Conservative parliamentary party is organized by the 1922 Committee. This group is made up of all of the Conservative back benchers in the House of Commons, but the core is the eighteen-person executive committee that effectively oversees the parliamentary party. The 1922 Committee has final say on all the rules and regulations of the parliamentary party. Because the frontbenchers are selected by the backbenchers through the 1922 Committee from among the backbenchers, this means that the backbenchers have a very powerful tool with which to impose their collective will on the Conservative Party leadership with minimal resistance from voters due to the party’s top-heavy approach to candidate selection.
When it comes to the office of Prime Minister specifically, the 1922 Committee has two important powers. First, the 1922 Committee controls the leadership selection process (the Party Leader is always the Prime Minister when the Conservatives are in power). The 1922 Committee organizes a series of votes on the leadership candidates. Each MP wishing to run for leader has to secure a number of nominations from other MPs before being considered. The 1922 Committee determines this number. Candidates are eliminated through progressive rounds of voting by the Conservative MPs until only two remain. The rank-and-file members of the Conservative Party then vote on these to determine the new leader, although the 1922 Committee has some say on which members are allowed to vote. For example, in the 2019 leadership election, the 1922 Committee added a rule partway through the leadership contest that voting members needed to have been subscription-paying members of the party before the beginning of the leadership contest; in other words, people who wanted to join the party to stop Boris Johnson were barred from voting. The second is 1922 Committee’s control of the leadership removal process. At every step of the way, the backbenchers control the leadership process through the 1922 Committee, and since they are really only beholden to general election voters and the Party Board, those same backbenchers are insulated from the Conservative Party’s voter base in a way that allows them to make difficult and unpopular decisions about the party leadership while being protected from popular backlash.
Boris Johnson’s rise and fall is a case in point. After a tenure as a journalist and a backbencher, he became a national figure for the Conservative Party as Mayor of London and as the face of the Leave campaign. When David Cameron resigned following the referendum result, he was replaced as Conservative Party Leader (and by extension, Prime Minister) by Theresa May, who then appointed Johnson to be Foreign Secretary. However, he resigned from this post in 2018 and rejoined the Conservative backbenchers ahead of mounting unrest against Theresa May from the parliamentary party. Johnson by now had a reputation among the other backbenchers for dishonesty and double-dealing. Regardless, he was one of the most popular politicians in the country and largely untainted by May’s difficulties governing after the Conservatives lost their majority in the 2017 election, after which she went into a costly alliance with the DUP (a hard-right Unionist, pro-Brexit, mostly Protestant Party from Northern Ireland). This alliance eventually brought her down, as it meant that the softer, less disruptive Brexit she had was pitching was no longer viable. The 1922 Committee then forced her to resign, and the next leadership contest began.
Boris was the favorite from the beginning, and although he was personally unpopular, the backbenchers largely coalesced behind him during the parliamentary party votes. This was due to the fact that it was widely accepted that, for all his personal flaws, he could restore the majority in the next election. However, there were two major opponents to him at this stage from the center-left of the party: Jeremy Hunt, the former Health Secretary who replaced Johnson as Foreign Secretary, and Rory Stewart, a minor frontbencher who staged an anti-Boris insurgency from among disparate Conservative backbenchers. The 1922 Committee, although officially neutral, threw its weight behind Boris. They played a role in stamping out Stewart’s insurgency, and when Jeremy Hunt was left as the sole opponent to Boris for the final party member vote, they made the aforementioned rules change to help secure Boris’s victory. And in the short-term, the Conservative Party was rewarded for their support of Boris: the 2019 election, held less then five months after Johnson became Prime Minister, was the best general election result for the Conservative Party in over thirty years. They came away with a 365-seat majority (out of 650 seats) and were the largest parliamentary party by over a hundred and fifty seats (Labour came in second with 202 seats, their worst result since 1935).
It was for this reason that Boris survived as long as he did. After three years of alienating much of the general public, the Conservative Party’s base, and members of the parliamentary party through numerous scandals, indiscretions, COVID-restriction violations, and political flip-flops, the 1922 called for a for a vote to remove him. Johnson survived, but surviving required him to use up almost all his remaining political capital among the backbenchers. After it was revealed that he had covered one of the Conservative Party whip’s sexual assault allegations, the 1922 told him to resign. Theoretically there could not be another leadership challenge to him for another year, but since the 1922 Committee could change that rule and call for another challenge (or use their influence to remove Johnson from the next general election ballot), he was powerless to stop them. Love him or loathe him, Johnson’s scandal-ridden tenure came to an end with him being forced out by his own party.
Why, then, did the same thing not happen to Donald Trump?
Donald Trump, by contrast, owed his position entirely to rank-and-file Republican voters and party members. The GOP actually had remarkably little leverage over him, because unlike the UK Conservative Party, the Republican Party leadership and elected officials do not have final say on who gets to be President. That power rests almost entirely with rank-and-file Republican voters. We saw how in 2016 Trump could essentially dictate terms to GOP elected officials. After all, what could they do to him? They couldn’t take him off the ticket without instigating a massive backlash from their own base during a very heated presidential election.
Likewise with the two attempts to impeach Donald Trump. In effect, impeachment was the only means to remove Donald Trump from office without having a general election. But even this was not a real mechanism. Voting to impeach Trump would have put most Republican senators in a very serious political bind. Both final impeachment votes were held with an open ballot, which meant that in order to vote against Trump, the vast majority of Republican senators were going to have to seriously jeopardize their own reelection efforts. Naturally, the majority voted against impeachment on both occasions. To do otherwise would have been political suicide. Holding politicians accountable for their actions is, after all, a double-edged sword.
In any of these cases, having a strong party apparatus in the form of something akin to the 1922 Committee would have made it much easier for Republicans to remove Donald Trump from office. They would never have chosen him in the first place, and even if they had, there would have been measures in place to keep him under control, either by contesting his leadership within the Party, or by having votes to remove him conducted with a secret ballot.
We must remember that both Donald Trump and Boris Johnson were corrupt, incompetent leaders who did serious damage to their countries’ domestic stability and international standing. And yet at the end of the day, when these men were removed from office, one went out with a bang and one went out with a whimper. The reasons for this had very little to do with their character; both fought tooth and nail not to be removed from office. It had little if anything to do with a “culture of accountability” or the like. If there was a substantial difference there, than Boris Johnson would not have survived nearly as long as he had; he probably never would have even become party leader. Politicians’ first concern is self-preservation. That is a fundamental reality of any and all democratic political systems. In Britain, self-preservation got politicians to defend their democracy by removing a dangerous and corrupt leader. In America, it led them to continue undermining our democracy by keeping a dangerous and corrupt leader in office. Until we acknowledge this ugly reality, take a page from Britain’s playbook, and restructure our governmental and partisan institutions accordingly, we will continue to see serious democratic backsliding in the United States.