Sir Simon Clarke’s call to replace Rishi Sunak leans heavily on Tory MPs being in denial about the scale of defeat that could be heading their way. He quotes Alan Clark on the ‘defence mechanism of the psyche’ that allowed Conservatives to disbelieve the landslide thumping forecast ahead of the 1997 election, even though ‘every single device for measuring popular opinion was pointing consistently in the same direction’. Sir Simon points out that Sunak trails Sir Keir Starmer in almost 500 constituencies and warns his colleagues that the price of failing to move against the prime minister will be far greater than the headlines that would come from yet another Tory regicide.

This analysis is reasonably sound, as far as it goes, though I suspect a fresh season of drama on the Treasury benches might attract harsher consequences than a ticking off from the press. After four prime ministers in four years, the public is, as we say in Scotland, scunnered. But even if finding those few remaining voters who don’t feel disgust towards the Conservatives and convincing them otherwise was a price worth paying, what exactly would the Tories get in return? This is the central flaw in Sir Simon’s appeal: it engages in denial, too, albeit a different variant.

The former chief secretary to the Treasury writes in the Telegraph:

If we change the leader to a Prime Minister who shares the instincts of the majority and is willing to lead the country in the right direction, we will recover strongly in 2024. We would deny Starmer the blank cheque he is heading towards, and perhaps even win the election.

What are those instincts? Migration control, naturally, but also supply-side reform, house-building and planning reform, tax and welfare reform, getting tough on crime, overhauling public services and fighting back in the culture war. Fair enough. A lot of Conservative voters would agree with that package and there are elements (e.g. house-building and updating planning laws) that those of us otherwise politically inclined could get on board with.

However, Sir Simon’s case is contingent on a resource which the Conservatives simply do not have: time. Even if Sunak went tomorrow, and even if he could be replaced as swiftly as he was installed, this parliament has at very most one year left, and that’s only if the government pushes the election back to the last possible date. Let’s assume also that the government tossed out all of its planned and current Bills and maximised the number of sitting days. Let’s even assume that all or most of the legislation and policies Sir Simon would like to see introduced have already been sketched out, perhaps by a friendly think tank, and would sail smoothly through departmental civil servants, the office of the parliamentary counsel and the Government Legal Profession.

Even under these favourable (and not terribly likely) circumstances, the government would struggle to correct course before the next election. Take the top issue Sir Simon cites: migration. Would the new Prime Minister wait for the Safety of Rwanda Bill to pass the Lords, gain Royal Assent then be tested in court? Or would fresh legislation be brought forward, and if so, what form would it take? As became clear during the Rwanda Bill’s passage through the Commons, there is a bloc of liberal Conservative MPs who are not prepared to go any further when it comes to addressing illegal migration. They have a view about the UK’s treaty and international legal obligations and believe action beyond that set out in the latest Bill would fail to comply with those obligations. What could a new (presumably right-wing) Prime Minister do to convince these MPs that their fellow liberal Sunak either could not or was not minded to do?

The Tories are in a right state and Sunak is plainly a dud

The Tories are in a right state and Sunak is plainly a dud – some of us pointed this out before it was a popular view – but there is little sense in replacing him if his replacement isn’t able to do anything different. Conservatives might believe that things can’t get any worse than they are now, but ousting a prime minister over immigration then forcing his successor to stick to the same immigration policy would certainly test that theory.

It’s much the same story on planning reform to free up housing supply. A grand idea, but one that would send the Tories’ loud and implacable NIMBY faction rushing to the barricades. We’re talking backbench revolts. ‘Save our green belt’ marches. Theresa Villiers coming at Michael Gove with the parliamentary mace. A culture-war pushback would run into similar obstacles to a migration crackdown. There is a not insubstantial faction of Conservative MPs who are cultural progressives and others who regard gender ideology, critical race theory and post-colonial history as distractions from bread-and-butter economic matters.

With a fair wind, a new prime minister might get part of Sir Simon’s agenda on the statute books and even then probably not the big-ticket items like migration. Beyond that, he or she would have to rely on messaging – attacking Labour and promising a fresh broom if the voters just put their trust in the Tories one more time. That’s a hard sell for a fourth-term government, even one with a good record to campaign on, and the Tories don’t even have that. There are strategies they might deploy to lessen the scale of their well-earned drubbing but that’s about it. If Conservative MPs are frustrated at their party’s failure to deliver conservative outcomes after four election victories, imagine how Conservative voters feel. The time for governing as Tories was when they were repeatedly elected to do so, not ten minutes to midnight with oblivion on the horizon.

Replace Rishi Sunak or don’t. The reckoning is coming.