'We’ve tried nothing, and we’re all out of ideas.'
Thirteen years of Conservative government.
Hard as it is to imagine now, when I first joined ConservativeHome I was the Europhile. Even up until the closing weeks of the referendum campaign, I wasn’t sure how I would vote.
But one of the things which in retrospect probably tipped me towards Leave was when David Cameron came back with his deal from Brussels and, in the words of someone on the Remain campaign, it “exploded on the launchpad”.
Those intimately familiar with Brussels, and the then-Prime Minister’s own team, stressed what a remarkable achievement it was in the context of EU politics. Eurosceptics pointed out that relative to his promises, let alone their expectations, it was extremely thin gruel indeed.
Each claim was right, from its own perspective - and it was the gulf between those perspectives that was the heart of the problem.
I was put in mind of this when reading Will Lloyd’s latest cover story for the New Statesman, ‘The Tory crack-up’. Amidst an enjoyable Louis Theroux in the Land of the Blind tour of the Conservative Party’s dissident fringes, we get this:
“After 13 contorted years, British conservatives, whether they are members of parliament, members of the party, or its outriders in the media, no longer know what conservatism is. Everything has been tried – David Cameron’s bougie nudge-theory paternalism; Theresa May’s Home Counties authoritarianism; Boris Johnson’s One Nation Global Britain boosterism; Liz Truss’s kamikaze Thatcherism – and everything has failed.”
I don’t think the compliment was intentional, but this is an heroic reading of this period of Tory government. It suggests intellectual dynamism and restless action (albeit tempered by evident failure to execute much of anything) which, outside a handful of isolated cases, I don’t think was actually much in evidence.1
Rather, I think that the kindest thing that can be said of any of the tendencies Lloyd describes is that they weren’t really tried. More damningly, I suspect that on their best days they didn’t really constitute trying much of anything. The recent Tory past is a political graveyard long on bodies, but short on ghosts; the party’s plight best summed up by Agnes Flanders: “We’ve tried nothing, and we’re all out of ideas.”
More than anything else, I think the “dark new factions” Lloyd describes are a revolt - not necessarily an effective one - against the invisible walls of British politics, made visible now by the sheer volume of Conservative wreckage piled against them.
You are, I hope, instinctively sceptical of the words “weren’t really tried”; this form of words is normally the refuge of the true believer from disappointing results. Until recently it was something right-wingers normally mocked socialists for saying, but now our side is in on the act:
“So no, until […] the new children of Britain’s fresh baby boom are cared for in our equally booming and rapidly less and less expensive liberated childcare sector, all before they return to beautiful new homes which are fast becoming more affordable thanks to the millions that have been allowed to be constructed in the most productive zones in the country. Until that day, real Trussism has not been tried.”
Listing things your project was supposed to achieve, and claiming it has not been tried until they have been achieved, is cheating. That’s not what this is about.
But in the case of Posterity vs Cameron, May, Johnson, and Truss, the defence can at least make the case that each defendant mostly spent their time in office wrestling with things they didn’t want to do, rather than carrying forward their own project.
David Cameron had only spent a couple of years triangulating between New Labour and the nation’s folk memory of the Tories before the Financial Crisis destroyed the economic conditions which made New Labour possible. His first term was then spent dealing with austerity, and the second with the EU referendum - neither of which were on his programme in 2005.
Theresa May’s short premiership was likewise dominated by trying to deliver Brexit, which she had not supported. Boris Johnson’s plan was to get Brexit done (to a given value of done) and then hose money at the North of England; instead he got lumbered with the Pandemic, which demanded policies he hated and used up all the Levelling Up money.
Finally, Liz Truss entered office in straightened fiscal circumstances and without an electoral mandate for any radical departure from Johnson’s vague, spendthrift manifesto.
None of the defendants are getting off the charges on this basis. Politics is about dealing with circumstances as you find them. But if we’re going to claim that “everything has been tried”, the extent to which any of the listed creeds were actually implemented matters.
It also highlights the deeper problem: the two instances where the leader really did try to break out of the status quo - May’s social care plan and Truss’s tax cuts - were both catastrophic, career-ending disasters.
Lloyd’s framing naturally emphasises the differences between the different flavours of Conservatism offered by the four previous prime ministers. And these did exist - but mostly, I think, at the level of vibes. On the deep substance of Britain’s political economy - immigration, education, welfare and entitlements, families - it is difficult to see any substantive differences.
As I argued recently on ConHome, not one of those governments ever engaged seriously with what reducing the UK’s long-term dependence on imported labour would involve. Nor with building a realistic alternative to New Labour’s debt-fuelled 2:1 treadmill. Nor with the housing crisis.
Whatever the rhetoric, time and again the actual policy was the short-term, least-resistance doubling down on the status quo: pump more demand into a supply crisis in homes, allow businesses ever-easier access to foreign labour, etc.
Policy responses have also been hopelessly Treasury-brained. Most recently, this has led to the weirdly Stakhanovite attitude that someone comfortably retired is simply a misfiring cog in the “labour force”.
More poisonously, it meant that the genuine iniquity over family policy - that working couples had to make difficult economic decisions about how many children to have and when, whereas the welfare system insulated others from those choices - was resolved via the two-child benefit cap, rather than making children more affordable for people higher up the income scale.
Even now, raising the issue of children with Tories of the Cameroon era gets one dismissed as a crank. Why go to the vast expense of gestating the next generation of taxpayers when you can, to quote one former spad, “just import people”?
As you might be able to detect from the tone of the above section, I think a revolt against such thinking is overdue and potentially useful. But for it to have any chance of taking a positive shape, let alone succeeding, we need to be honest about why it has proven so difficult to shift.
May deserves genuine credit for attempting to make asset-rich older people pay more towards the cost of their own social care. But it destroyed her premiership. Truss deserves far less for her kamikaze tax-cutting bid; the balancing spending reductions could never have been delivered, and the attempt would have destroyed her anyway. But each grasped a third rail, with dire results.
Status-quo Conservatism may often amount to little more than fire-is-hot political cognition - lurch away from the pain stimuli, apply the immediate salve, repeat - but fire is hot, and the root causes of many of this country’s problems are politically popular. There is never going to come a moment when the electorally-dominant older generation are suddenly up for paying for things, nor when business decides that it’s finally a good time for them to invest in training and higher wages and otherwise internalise a load of costs they’ve been palming off for decades.
If you want something to happen in the long term, you have at some point to start doing the work in the here and now.
As in the 1970s, any successful challenge to this status quo is going to require a lot of pitch-rolling and intellectual legwork. It will also mean taking on some Tory shibboleths, and thinking much more strategically about how to wield power - less comprehensive planning reform, more Metropolitan Planning Bills.
There is little sign of any of that at the moment. The CDO is a cargo cult which doesn’t really have a strategy beyond waiting for Johnson; the NatCons, contra some of the more breathless commentary, aren’t really anything yet, beyond a forum for discontent with American sponsorship.
Perhaps, as Lloyd suggests, something more substantive will cohere over the next few years, and this generation’s Keith Joseph and Institute of Economic Affairs (albeit with very different philosophies) will emerge. Perhaps not, and it will remain stuck in the death zone of bleating about ends without thinking about means.
But either way, the observation underpinning this revolt on the right is a fair one: that if “everything has been tried” since 2010, then everything did not amount to very much.
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Michael Gove and Nick Gibb at Education is the only prominent example that springs to mind. Brexit was an accident.
Have you considered the possibility that the entire model is wrong?
I'm 45. We've had Conservative Prime Ministers for slightly more than two thirds of my life, after which we appear to be incapable of, inter alia, building a couple of hundred miles of railway; housing the working-age population without financially crippling them first; dealing efficiently or humanely with a smaller number of asylum-seekers than other countries seem to cope with.
Perhaps it is the ideology that will happily junk twenty years of infrastructure and capacity planning to allow headroom in nonsense self-imposed rules for giveaway pre-election tax-cuts that's wrong and the issues you identify are just symptoms of that?