Why the Tory party may now be ungovernable

Factions led by so many disaffected ex-ministers mean Truss will struggle to whip the party into line

She is pursuing policies for which she has no electoral mandate, and therefore MPS do not feel dutybound to back them

The most disgruntled among them are the disaffected Sunakites, including Dominic Raab, Matt Hancock and Gavin Williamson

Aside from the non-stop gossip about how long Liz Truss and Kwasi Kwarteng will keep their jobs, there is a more troubling question on the lips of delegates at the Tory conference in Birmingham: has the party now become ungovernable?

After 12 years in power, the party is so riven with factional divides, so full of disgruntled big beasts and so ill-disciplined that Ms Truss faces very real uncertainty about whether she can get any of her key policies through the House of Commons.

Conference-goers have barely been able to avoid stumbling into one fringe event or another where the everpresent Michael Gove is openly calling on his colleagues to rebel.

He and his backbench acolytes have caused such mayhem that Ms Truss and Mr Kwarteng have been forced to abandon their 45p tax cut plan and flip-flop on bringing forward November’s spending review as a conference that should have been a victory lap turned into humiliation.

Now even Iain Duncan Smith, who ran Ms Truss’s leadership campaign with Thérèse Coffey, is rebelling against her plans for a real-terms cut in benefit payments. This is, partly, a Truss problem: she is pursuing policies for which she has no electoral mandate, and therefore MPS do not feel duty-bound to back them.

But if Rishi Sunak had been elected as leader and plumped for a less radical economic policy, it is entirely likely he, too, would have faced serial rebellions from a party that has resolved its Europe problem but has found new ways of falling out with itself.

One of the biggest problems for Ms Truss, or anyone who had won the last leadership contest, is that three different prime ministers in the space of little more than three years has meant a vast churn of ministers and supporters, leaving the backbenches packed with big beasts.

If they feel overlooked by the current regime, and if they believe their ministerial careers are now over, it is all but impossible to whip them into line. Most of them also believe they could do a better job than their successors, and are not afraid to say it.

Research by the Institute for Government shows there are currently 119 former ministers on the backbenches, meaning more than two thirds of all backbench Tory MPS have held a ministerial post. They include two former prime ministers in Boris Johnson and Theresa May, former chancellors Rishi Sunak and Sajid Javid, and other big names including Dominic Raab, Michael Gove, Priti Patel, Matt Hancock, Iain Duncan Smith, Jeremy Hunt and Grant Shapps.

All of them are capable of causing huge problems for the Prime Minister, and rallying fellow MPS to their cause. Yesterday, former home secretary Ms Patel broke her brief post-cabinet silence to tell a fringe event that Ms Truss was “spending [money] today with no thought of tomorrow”.

The problem for Ms Truss, as with Mr Johnson and Mrs May, is that she has been thrown straight into the job of Prime Minister at a time when the party has started to take power for granted. In contrast, David Cameron had been leader in opposition for five years by the time he entered No 10, meaning he’d had time to mould the parliamentary party and went into government leading a party hungry for power and easily disciplined.

A total of 91 current MPS did not back Mrs May, Mr Johnson or Ms Truss as their first choice for prime minister, meaning that around a quarter of all current MPS have never had the leader they wanted. The most disgruntled among them are the disaffected Sunakites, including Mr Raab, Mr Hancock and Gavin Williamson, who argued throughout the leadership campaign that Ms Truss was promising an unachievable “fairy tale” economic miracle, while their man was the honest broker who was punished for telling the truth. They remain so bitter about the leadership election that they will feel no compunction about voting against the Government. Some of them are still convinced Mr Sunak will get another chance to lead.

Ms Truss’s natural constituency is the hard right of the party, including Jacob Rees-mogg, John Redwood and Steve Baker, but the majority of MPS belong to other formal or informal factions which are already plotting how to pick off the policies they do not like.

There are the Boris Mourners, led by former culture secretary Nadine Dorries, Ms Patel and Conor Burns, who remain convinced the party should never have got rid of Mr Johnson, and have little enthusiasm for his successor.

The Red Wallers, led by party chairman Jake Berry, are concerned they will lose their seats if Ms Truss presses ahead with benefit reforms, as are the One Nation Conservatives, including Damian Green, Robert Buckland and Tom Tugendhat, who represent the centre ground and will be a natural hand brake on Ms Truss’s more radical ideas.

There is also a group of serial rebels, including former defence minister Tobias Ellwood, and backbenchers Roger Gale and Andrew Bridgen, and there are more formal factions such as the Blue Collar Conservatives, led by former minister Esther Mcvey, the Common Sense Group, led by Sir John Hayes, and the Northern Research Group, though there is much overlap between the informal and formal groupings.

Spread throughout all of them are MPS who regard themselves as overlooked talent, such as Mr Shapps, Mr Gove and Mr Duncan Smith, all of whom have made their voices heard at conference.

If the party was already difficult to govern, Ms Truss has made it doubly so thanks to the decisions she made in her first few days in power.