Though the Labour party is going through a crisis at present, with its leader Jeremy Corbyn trying to survive a rebellion from the vast majority of his own MPs, the Conservative party is also in the midst of an internal struggle.
It was expected that in the European Union (EU) referendum the Remain campaign, which the Prime Minister and leader of the conservative party David Cameron led, would prevail. If so then Cameron might have been able to hang on to his leadership of the party, even though many of his own MPs had backed the leave campaign and would not have been happy with his victory.
However, to almost everyone’s shock, it turned out that on June 23rd 2016 the majority of the British people voted to leave the European Union. As a consequence of the vote, the very next morning when the result had been announced, David Cameron announced that he was resigning as Prime Minister and as leader of the Conservative party. If he had stayed on he would have had to start negotiating Britain’s exit from the EU which he suggested, as someone who did not want Britain to leave, was not the right person for the job.
And since during the referendum pro-EU and anti-EU Conservative MPs were often openly combative with each other, with one MP Amber Rudd suggesting in a live debate that the Leave campaigner Boris Johnson was not trustworthy, he will be leaving a deeply divided party.
Though he is still going to be the party’s leader until another is elected to replace him in September. And despite Cameron saying that he is to resign because he campaign for Britain to remain in the EU, one Conservative MP who has already placed his hat in the ring is Welshman Stephen Crabb, who also campaigned for Britain to remain part of the EU.
Stephen Crabb has been MP for eleven years now and was recently made the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions after Ian Duncan Smith MP quit the job in March in protest of the government’s cuts to public spending. Before that he was the Secretary of State for Wales. He has previously come under scrutiny for his links to a Christian group which some have claimed is a homophobic organisation.
It was also believed that Boris Johnson, thought to be the most popular politician in Britain, would put himself up for leader of the contest before submissions for the leadership closed on Friday June 30th. Unlike Stephen Crabb, some reports said that he already had the backing of 100 Conservative MPs, making it almost certain that he’d have got through the first stage of the contest – the Parliamentary Party ballot, in which candidates must gain the backing of as many of the party’s MPs as they can.
However, the MP thought to be his key backer, Michael Gove, abandoned Johnson to stand for the leadership himself. It is believed that because of this unexpected move by Gove that Boris Johnson announced he would not run for the leadership of the party later that same day.
Image: Brian Green [CC BY-SA 2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons
0 Comment:
Be the first one to comment on this article.