The Tories are better off without Andrew Boff

A couple of days ago the Tories lost a Greater London Assembly Member (AM). Andrew Boff, an AM since 2008, had applied to be the party’s mayoral candidate, but was turned down because he openly rejected the party policy of ECHR withdrawal, painstakingly established by Kemi Badenoch a year ago. He resigned in protest, and will now sit as an independent. It’s all very well to talk of the Conservative party being a broad church or a big tent: but there must be limits This is being spun as a courageous assertion of principle over dogma, of moderation over a Conservative party that is still a group of zealots in thrall to right-wing extremism. In a waspish resignation statement, Boff referred to the Tories as a party that ‘cannot tolerate support for fundamental human rights’, said they had ‘abandoned’ Conservative principles, and that in any case the London Assembly had no jurisdiction over human rights and therefore his maverick views should have been irrelevant. He is wrong, and Kemi needs to hold fast on the point of principle. For one thing, his patrician suggestion that the Conservatives are a party that ‘cannot tolerate support for fundamental human rights’ is hogwash. Central Office has no objection whatsoever to trenchant support for any number of rights: freedom of speech and religion, the protection of privacy, safeguards against arbitrary interreference by the state, and so on. Nor, one suspects, would it greatly disagree with the values originally lying behind the treaty we helped draft in the 1940s and ratified in 1951. What it does object to, and rightly, is something different: namely, the bizarre interpretation increasingly placed on those rights by an activist Strasbourg court and the transnational human rights establishment. Most popular Douglas Murray France is a warning – our civilisation is not immortal The Spectator Sally Rooney and the comfortable violence of the left Madeline Grant The perils of baby names Another red herring is Boff’s curious idea that because the London Assembly has no power over human rights, it must follow that his own outspoken views are no big deal. There are plenty of official Tory policies on matters well outside the Assembly’s remit: think repealing the Employment Act, ditching national net zero, ending public bankrolling of universities offering dubious degrees, and more. But it would be somewhat remarkable to suggest that the Tories were bound to look the other way if someone demanded to be allowed to stand as a would-be Tory mayor while admitting to being implacably wedded to, say, net zero by 2050. London voters deciding who to back as mayor will look at a candidate’s outlook generally, not simply their views on Assembly matters. More to the point, it’s all very well to talk of the Conservative party being a broad church or a big tent: but there must be limits. Make the structure too big or broad, and sooner or later you won’t have a church or tent at all. One thing that drove voters in their millions away from the Tories in the years up to 2024 was unclarity about what a Tory was. Any insistence on being a party of thrift, small government and limited immigration rang rather hollow when compared to what Tory MPs had said and done in office. Kemi, to her credit, has seen this. She has imposed at least a measure of official clarity and consistency in what her party stands for. Having done so, it is vital that she now scotch efforts by mavericks like Boff to reverse this process by going back to the idea that party policy is more a starting point for an argument rather than a clear line. A strong line on this is also vital for simple electoral reasons. Like it or not, the London mayoralty is a high-profile political job: much more so, frankly, than that of shadow junior minister for social serendipity or backbench MP for Somewhere-on-the-Wolds. If Andrew Boff were selected, the Conservatives would immediately have started out on the back foot. It does no party campaign any good when there are open and visceral disagreements about major aspects of policy. The Tories would never have heard the last of stories of infighting and irreconcilable policy differences. (Note, incidentally, that here Boff has form. Three years ago, to the barely-concealed delight of the opposition press, he had to be removed by security from the Tory conference in Manchester after yelling at Suella Braverman that she was a racist and homophobe.) It used to be said that the Conservatives had a secret weapon denied to other parties – loyalty. Following the Brexit debacle that lay shattered into shards. Kemi has now, quietly, begun to re-assemble the pieces. As part of this process she has rightly called Andrew Boff’s bluff, calculating correctly that he will do less harm as an independent than a Tory insider. She needs to keep her nerve steady if and when anything similar happens in future.