MP Chris Skidmore’s resignation is another step towards the total disintegration of the Conservative Party

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Chris Skidmore had already announced that he was standing down as a Conservative MP at the next general election, because his Kingswood constituency is being abolished.

Half of his seat would make up a new constituency called North East Somerset and Hanham, which in normal times would be safe Tory territory, but he didn’t try to stand there.

In possibly related news, he had said last July, before announcing he was standing down, that Conservative Party members are unwilling to prioritise the government’s 2050 net zero targets “because 90 per cent of them will be dead”.

Now Skidmore says he will be standing down “as soon as possible”, in protest at the government’s green policy, causing a by-election. It is an empty gesture, in that the winner of the by-election, presumably the Labour candidate, will hold the seat for only a few months. Labour needs a mere 12 per cent swing to win, after gaining swings of 21 and 24 per cent in by-elections in Mid Bedfordshire, Selby and Tamworth.

An empty gesture, but a damaging one. If Rishi Sunak hoped, when he announced that the general election would probably be in the second half of this year, that Conservative prospects might start to improve, he was quickly disappointed. Yet another by-election in which Keir Starmer’s party can bank another win evocative of the Blair landslide era is not what the Tory brand needs right now.

Sunak’s attempts to hold the party together, which included the desperate tactic of accommodating Suella Braverman at the Home Office for rather longer than seemed strictly necessary, have only postponed the disintegration.

It is not just Sunak’s longer-standing enemies in the party who seek to undermine him at every turn, but his former friends too. Boris Johnson and Liz Truss have been conspicuously unhelpful, voting against the new prime minister’s Windsor Framework for Northern Ireland trade rules within five months of Sunak taking office (although Johnson did go out of his way to avoid trashing his former chancellor at the Covid inquiry, in what appeared to be an unspoken, mutually assured non-destruction pact).

As for Sunak’s former friends, Skidmore started off supporting him for the leadership in the 2022 summer contest, before switching to Liz Truss. Truss rewarded him by appointing him chair of an official review of policies aimed at achieving net zero.

Sunak, on the other hand, punished him by failing to make him a minister and by announcing a “proportionate and pragmatic” approach to climate-change policies, which Skidmore condemned in his letter of resignation as “the greatest mistake of your premiership”.

Robert Jenrick was one of the three mid-ranking ministers, along with Sunak and Oliver Dowden, who wrote an article for The Times in the last days of Theresa May’s premiership saying: “Only Boris Johnson can save us.” He turned on his ally last month, upset that he hadn’t been promoted to home secretary when Braverman was sacked. Like Skidmore, he sought to wound Sunak on the way out, accusing him of promoting a Rwanda asylum policy that was “a triumph of hope over experience”. This was unfair because the policy that Jenrick advocated in his resignation letter is unworkable – he knows perfectly well that there are about 100 Tory MPs who would not vote for any law that explicitly repudiated the European Court of Human Rights.

But that is what the Tory party has come to. Ministers who agree on the ends resigning, accusing the prime minister of failing to will the means. And backbenchers such as Skidmore triggering a by-election that will further propel Starmer into Downing Street.

There is a minor paradox here, in that Skidmore ought to be well aware that the Labour Party’s policies, while they might look a little greener on the surface, are in no fit state to make a real difference to climate change. Skidmore’s report on net zero for the Truss government was produced extremely quickly, but the government didn’t last long enough to publish it, so Skidmore put it out as a book called Mission Zero. It sets out – in the sort of detail both the government and opposition have avoided – the scale, complexity and by implication cost of meeting the target. Rachel Reeves’s shadow Treasury team will have read it with a mounting sense of panic.

Even those who harbour doubts about the benefit of the election of a Labour government in resisting climate change, however, might see some gains in Skidmore’s departure. Robin Walker, the Tory chair of the education select committee, will no longer be mistaken for him – they look similar except when Skidmore has a beard. And the rest of us can look forward to the “multi-volume biography of Henry VIII, in the style of Robert Caro”, that Skidmore, a distinguished historian of early modern England, promised 10 years ago.

But Sunak can only look forward to things falling apart. It seems that the longer he delays the election, the worse things will get for the Conservatives.