A very, very,
very delayed follow up to
this post.
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The vast majority of the time, when a party is forced to hold a leadership race only 2 years after the last, it is a sign the previous leader was, to put it kindly, not very good at his job. It is a sign that the party was floundering in opposition, or looked doomed to soon be there. Yet this was not at all the case for the British Conservative Party, who held a leadership election in 2012 only 2 years after their previous one in 2010. The party was united under their newly-minted leader George Osbourne, and was consistently leading the Labour Government in the opinion polls.
And then tragedy struck.
On the afternoon of April 6th, 2012, George Osbourne, leader of the Conservative and Unionist Party and considered by many the favourite to win the 2015 election, was killed in a car accident.
Immediately, tributes began to pour in from all sides. Those who had served under him as Conservative MPs, both on the back and frontbenches, praised him as a truly visionary man who would have changed Britain for the better, whilst the government heralded him as a fundamentally good person who served the House of Commons well.
Terrible though Osbourne's death was, the Conservative Party had little time to mourn, what with having to organize a leadership election and all. The overwhelming favourite for the contest was Shadow Chancellor Theresa May. She was deeply tied to Osbourne, but she was also very much a strong candidate in her own right, having served in the Shadow Cabinet almost continuously since 1999.
In the end May faced only one challenger, all the other contenders either refusing to run or having entered and dropped out: Nadine Dorries. Dorries, a staunchly right wing MP with no Shadow Cabinet experience, had previously ran for the leadership in 2010 just as a way to state her intense dislike for George Osbourne and his predecessor. In truth, it may have been more accurate to say May faced no challenger, so low were Dorries's chances of winning.
With only 2 candidates, there was no need for any MPs ballots, and the party went straight into a members vote. With May popular among the membership and Dorries having no coalition to build off of, it was all but assured that May would win. Sure enough, May won the leadership easily, taking over 70% of the vote.
