Tories: focus! You're not helping

There is a mountain for the Conservative Party to climb to be competitive at the next election, and everyone needs to understand where we are and how we go forward

I’ve written before that I am a tribal Tory. By that I don’t mean that I won’t listen to other points of view or think their holders are malign or stupid; I’d be surprised if even half of my friends habitually vote Conservative, and even those that do form a broad and intricately detailed spectrum of the right wing. In any event, I thrive on discussion, debate, argumentation (though not argument), and I’m happy to talk about these things into the wee hours, listen to other people, explain what I think and why. It needn’t end in conversion for either participant, but, if absolutely nothing else, it’s always fascinating to hear other people expand on their views and sometimes, when the bonnet is lifted and you are up to your elbows in intellectual grease, you find that you and your interlocutor have a lot more in common that you thought. Even if you don’t, provided goodwill is maintained, that’s also fine.

(In the context of Sue Gray, the second permanent secretary at the Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities, accepting an invitation to become chief of staff to the leader of the opposition, Sir Keir Starmer, I want to say a few words on impartiality. It’s the default setting of the civil service, or should be, and in my 11 years as a senior official in Parliament, I had to maintain absolutely scrupulous absence of partisan bias in every part of my work. We expressed no view which would be attached to one particular party, we were (informally) forbidden from joining a political party or other overtly political organisation—I got away with the Royal Society of Arts and the British Film Institute but something like the Fabian Society, the Henry Jackson Society or even the Countryside Alliance might have caused unease—and we had to be careful even to manage social relationships with Members of Parliament.

It is all about trust: as clerks working for the House of Commons as an institution, and available to all Members from every party, we had to demonstrate that we had nothing in us which would compromise our ability to provide a first-class service to any MP from any party. I had no doubt a million faults as a clerk, and I know what some of the more prominent ones are, but I will say with confidence, I don’t think misplaced, that an MP ever doubted my dedication and readiness to help for reasons of partisan bias. It was, although I was and am a Conservative, something which was very important to me, and I’m reasonably proud of having maintained a unbiased reputation over that decade. I could separate what I thought from what I had to do in professional terms, and I certainly never tried to introduce any kind of party advantage into any part of my work.)

When I describe my politics as “tribal”, what I mean is that I grew up with a broadly comfortable Conservative identity, came to realise that at some fundamental level I occupied the same ideological space as the Conservative Party, though by no means have I always found myself absolutely aligned with it on every issue or have I held back, since I regained a political voice, from criticising the party where I think its policies or approach have been wrong. Nevertheless, I will almost certainly vote Conservative, for three reasons.

Firstly, I think one should vote, because those who don’t engage with the process don’t get to complain if they don’t like the outcome and because it is a right which has been fiercely contested and expensively won. Secondly, it is unlikely that the party would follow a policy or set of policies which would be so inimical to me that I would not be able to lend it my support; I suppose my red lines would be things like the maintenance of the monarchy, the overall integrity of the Union, the protection of fundamental human rights and the rule of law. Thirdly, I simply cannot imagine myself crossing the ideological gap to another party because it would surely be a more uncomfortable fit and might present me with those very red lines from the other side: the Labour Party’s basic preference for the apparatus of the state as the best way to direct and order society and the belief that taxpayers’ money is most wisely spent by the government; the Scottish National Party’s commitment to dissolving the Union; the honking hypocrisy and smothering, sneering piety of the Liberal Democrats; and the crude, cynical, stupidity-embracing populism of whatever identity Nigel Farage’s omnium-gatherum of red-faced, default-angry followers are currently using (at the moment it is Reform UK, under the smoothly ambitious but inexplicable Richard Time).

What all of this means is that, unless there is some kind of political earthquake between now and the next general election, which is likely to he held in the summer of 2024, I will make my mark in the box next to the name of the Conservative party candidate in Brentford and Isleworth (unless I move house). I have no idea how much enthusiasm I will have when I do that, but I will almost certainly do it. I’m not a masochist: I want to bounce into the polling station with a spring in my step and endorse the Conservative challenger as the representative of a disciplined, experienced, capable and forward-looking party and a manifesto which offers a range of sensible, creative, well-considered and effective policies to make the United Kingdom more prosperous, more vibrant, more secure and more self-confident over the course of the next parliament. I really do want that, and I am still enough of an optimist to think it is not an impossible expectation.

The Conservative party is currently facing huge challenges. I do not underestimate them, nor do I think we are doing enough yet to overcome them or that we can simply wait for the Labour Party to stumble and victory to roll back towards us as if of right. Starmer is slowly beginning to sharpen his party’s image and make it look like a team of at-least credible alternative ministers, speaking at least something like the same language as the electorate and responsive to the priorities of voters. Some pundits have jostled for attention by shrieking a contentious prediction at the volume of a particularly dyspeptic and nihilistic sibyl; 2024 will be a more severe defeat than 1997, or worse than 1945, or (this is the connoisseur’s choice) a greater catastrophe than 1906. I am not so sure. It is possible, of course. After nearly 15 years, the electorate is bored of the Conservatives, though, God knows, the party is a little like Trigger’s broom by now compared to 2010.

(If you want to savour and perhaps marvel at just how much has changed, look at this photograph of a cabinet meeting in May 2010 and this roster of ministers appointed in October 2022, and see how few faces are the same, and how different the atmosphere is.)

I’m not going to try to write a skeleton manifesto here. Of course I have ideas, both for individual policies and for broader priorities and a comprehensive narrative; after all, I worked on two leadership campaigns last year, so I naturally gave some thoughts to the longer term and where the party might choose as its direction for the rest of the 2019 Parliament. But that was not to be, and I am now on the “unreliable” list, so even if I did draft a manifesto of Platonic perfection, with the wisdom of Solomon, the ambition of Beveridge and the style of Fitzgerald, it would not be warmly or generously received.

But at this point in the progress of the political conflict, there are some issues I want to touch on briefly which, I think, would help the Conservative Party perform at the upper range of its potential and which would help us tie off its various wounds and start to look away from stabilisation and towards recovery. I don’t want to appear negative, but at present these are best summed up in a short, straightforward and minatory guide: three things not to do.

1. It’s time to let Boris go

By this stage, it doesn’t matter whether you found Boris Johnson an irresistibly charming bundle of energetic scribble or an empty-eyed ambition-machine with no regard for the concept of truth, honesty or propriety. He surrendered his seals of office on 6 September 2022 and he is emphatically not getting them back. He has enough of a challenge to retain his place in the House of Commons as the Member for Uxbridge and South Ruislip where the electorate now has more Remainers and Rejoiners than Brexiteers and his majority, even in the good year of 2019, was only 7,210. He is also being investigated by the House of Commons Committee of Privileges to establish whether, in describing and defending activities in Number 10 Downing Street and elsewhere during the Covid-19 pandemic, he misled the House, if so whether that represented a contempt of Parliament, and if so how serious that contempt was.

This issue is not going well for him. On Friday, the committee published an interim report on Johnson’s actions, identifying the principal issues which it will see to raise with him when he gives oral evidence to the committee later this month. The interim report is a short, calm and measured document, but it is, in a cold and methodical way, already damning, suggesting strongly that Johnson fell substantially below the level of honesty and transparency which the House is entitled to expect in senior ministers.

Johnson has responded vigorously, using the controversy over Sue Gray’s appointment as chief of staff to Sir Keir Starmer to try to inject a degree of uncertainty and scepticism into the investigative process. This is a plain attempt to obfuscate and mislead: the committee’s investigation does not rely on Gray’s report but in evidence it has received directly and responses to questions it has asked. Johnson also claims that the report has left him “vindicated”, an interpretation so far from any reasonable version of the truth that it can only be a testament to his self-confidence or desperation, and a willingness to say anything, however accurate or inaccurate, to try to avoid the judgement which seems to be heading inexorably his way.

And there are still some Conservatives willing—even eager—to throw themselves between Johnson and the bullet of parliamentary scrutiny. Admittedly, those prepared to ride into battle in defence of the fallen leader are now a diminished and rather eccentric band of Tory desperados. Naturally, the former culture secretary Nadine Dorries, most dewy-eyed of all Johnsonites, had expressed her anger in clear terms. Pointing to Sue Gray, she insisted that the motivation behind the internal inquiry into Partygate “was to bring down the Brexit-supporting prime minister, Boris Johnson”. It is a conspiracy theory of an especially skimpy nature, and a moment’s thought will demonstrate how absurd it is, but “a moment’s thought” is not really Dorries’s standard operating procedure.

Where one finds Dorries, one will often also find Lord Cruddas, the eccentric billionaire who has made a billion-pound fortune in online shares trading with his company CMC Markets. Peter Cruddas was elevated to the House of Lords by Johnson in 2020, despite the House of Lords Appointments Commission, chaired by the meticulous Lord Bew, having unanimously recommended that the offer of a peerage be rescinded on the grounds that Cruddas is a major donor to the Conservative Party (of which he was treasurer from 2011 to 2012). Since the former prime minister’s self-immolation last year, Cruddas has taken up the gonfalon of St Boris and is convinced that only by restoring Johnson to the leadership can the Conservatives hope to win the next election. He has, like Dorries, been sharply critical of Gray and the implications of her new post on the report she compiled into “Partygate”; last week he weighed in with abandon on Twitter, shrieking “Surely this is conflict of interest, report and committee has no credibility. What a stitch up.” This is clearly nonsense, but Cruddas has enormous determination and stamina if nothing else.

The hankering for Boris must stop not just because so long as the king across the water is sitting in his tent like Achilles, radiating destabilising waves of discontent and looming over the slight figure of Rishi Sunak, though that is a damaging enough prospect. More importantly, and contrary to he flat untruths in which Dorries and Cruddas are happy to steep themselves, the idea that Boris Johnson was the major contributor to the last general election and was popular to a much greater degree than his party is simply not borne out by any statistical evidence. The legendary polling guru and psephologist Sir John Curtice, professor of politics at the University of Strathclyde, minced no words when asked for a summation last autumn.

Johnson has never been that popular. He was very popular among Leave voters back in 2019 but deeply unpopular among Remain voters so he basically appealed to one half of the country but not the other. There is a bit of a myth about him being a gloriously popular politician but he never has been, certainly not since 2016.

These hard data do not seem to influence Johnson partisans. The charismatic old Etonian is simply stated to be an electoral advantage, and it seems plausible: with a government in the doldrums and struggling to regain any momentum or ability to surge ahead of the opposition in terms of individual policy, surely the wild, fluent, disruptive Johnson would give the government an edge it currently lacks. That might be a logical equation, but it is simply devoid of substance or foundation. Johnson benefited from facing possibly Labour’s worst ever leader, Jeremy Corbyn, in December 2019, and he brought the party together under the eyecatching if meaningless slogan of Get Brexit Done”. But the idea that he possessed a significant electoral edge over the humdrum chiefs of his own party is now so fervently believed that it is taken as read.

Johnson is not only very far from being the innocent and noble victim of a coup; in fact he remains mired in controversy and allegations of wrong-doing. There is every reason to think that Johnson would undermine the role of prime minister if he returned, as he gave so little mind to its reputation when he occupied it, he has certainly not learned his lesson, and he is now hedged about with that most poisonous and vain element of political qualities, ennui. We have heard so much about Boris and witnessed so many attempts to absolve him from any vague responsibility for Partyagte he might still harbour a belief that he can return in glory and save the party from itself. He cannot: Johnson is now a very much diminished and perhaps financially destructive and self-serving candidate, and his reinstatement would only open old old wounds about corruption, display disregard for the electorate and the party membership and enhance the notion that the Conservative Party is addicted to the preferential treatment of party donors and friends, a cavalier approach to rules and regulations and a sly, short-term model of leadership which exists only to sustain itself.

If the Conservative Party is to remain even a competitor over the next 18 months, it must accept that, after four different leaders in seven years, that kind of self-indulgent in-fighting has to stop, and stop straight away. Rishi Sunak is party leader and prime minister, and, failing the sudden appearance of the proverbial bus, he will and must remain so. To reach for a fifth figurehead would confirm in the minds of voters what many of them already suspect, that the party is so delirious from the stress of office that it can now do nothing more than engage in a series of cosplay squabbles over ideology or, worse, simple personalities. Johnson had his time in the sun, can be judged by the generous to have accumulated some achievements, but demonstrated himself utterly unfit for the seriousness, dignity and focus of the highest office. Even if, by some freak of chance, the Committee of Privileges does not hand him a heavy penalty for misleading the House of Commons, we must look to the future. To quote Hemingway, perhaps not Boris’s sort of writer with his brutal, spare prose and unsparing pursuit of essential truth:

We can’t ever go back to old things or try and get the ‘old kick’ out of something or find things the way we remembered them.

2. We can’t just wait for Labour to make mistakes

Given the scale of the 2019 victory over the Labour Party, and the extent to which that was founded on disastrous choices and actions by the opposition, it is very tempting for Conservatives to look at Sir Keir Starmer’s sometimes-wobbly progress to the current day and imagine that he and his party will make mistakes, misjudge situations and generally prove themselves in adequate to assume the government of the United Kingdom. It is a strategy which is made more attractive yet by the fact that it requires the Conservatives to do virtually nothing save watch the challenges Labour faces and occasionally toss a banana skin down into the arena to help things along.

This is basic politics. The longstanding axiom is that oppositions don’t win elections, governments lose them. It’s a crude generalisation—the Conservatives may have been destined to lose power in 1997, but Tony Blair and his coterie did a great deal to make the Labour win a landslide—but it does reflect the fact that, more often than not, the subconscious calculation in voters’ minds when they enter the polling booth is “Do I want this government to continue in office?” It’s only if that is not an obvious decision that a second, qualitative question might be posed: “How well-prepared and capable is the party which is seeking to become the new government?” A shambolic opposition can reinforce a choice. Michael Foot’s Labour Party was clearly in no position to take the reins of power in 1983, while the Conservatives were still going through their long process of purgation when William Hague faced the voters in 2001. In neither case, though, was the opposition within touching distance of victory in any event.

But we are worlds away from that in any case. It is now more than three years since Keir Starmer became leader of the opposition, and, although only his most passionate adherents would claim he oozes charisma or electrifies crowds with his golden oratory, he has hit a succession of modest targets and is now performing at a solid level. He may not be brilliant, but he doesn’t need to be. Moreover, some of the Tory attacks on him are losing their potency. It is entirely true that he served on the front bench under Jeremy Corbyn almost from the moment of his election to the House until Corbyn’s resignation, and so it is, by extension, formally true that he sought to put Corbyn in Downing Street in June 2017 and December 2019; that might have been a jibe with some sting in 2020 or 2021. But so much has changed now, it is simply a quirk of the historical record. Tony Blair, after all, was first elected to the House of Commons on a manifesto dubbed “the longest suicide note in history”, which pledged withdrawal from the European Economic Community and unilateral nuclear disarmament. Everyone has to start somewhere.

All of this notwithstanding, for the Conservatives to rely on Labour failings to show the opposition unfit for office would require the government to be at the absolute top of its game. And we all know, however uncomfortable it may make us, that that is not true. It has been a hard month/year/time period of choice: any calendar year which has included three prime ministers, one of whom chalked up the shortest tenure in history, and a Budget-that-wasn’t-a-Budget but is still being held up as a model of how not to conceive or manage economic policy, probably suggests that there is work to be done. The death of Boris Johnson’s administration was long, flailing and messy, and there are few, if any, involved who have emerged with credit. The Truss interlude, those weird, febrile, strangely airless 49 days of chaos, only served to potentiate the difficulties which Johnson had brought.

Rishi Sunak, when he eventually emerged holding the bent and twisted crown on 25 October last year (my birthday, as it happens, as it is every year), faced an enormous job in restoring order, injecting a degree of professionalism into the government and forging a new policy platform for the post-Brexit era, and it is only fair to recognise that he has not yet been in office for five months. But he does not have unlimited time. There must be a general election soon, and the prime minister must be aware in every decision he makes of the tightly woven framework around him. He is intelligent and realistic enough to know that he has inherited a party at a low ebb, and must understand, therefore, that even hauling the Conservatives into contention for the general election must be an all-in, maximum-commitment fight, not a desperate hope that the other side stumbles.

3. You can’t retreat to your base if you’re not sure if they’re still there

It’s no-one’s idea of an uplifting, inspiring, ready-for-the-history-books election victory, but sometimes a government will decide that its surest route to success is to maximise the support of its natural base. After all, identifying those voters who are very unlikely to support any other party, and doing everything you can to make sure those voters go to the polls rather than staying at home, is a straightforward process. It does not rely on great ideological flexibility, nuance or triangulation; indeed, it is a matter of drawing up a clear policy platform and making very clear your party’s commitment to it.

A classic example of appealing to the base is the 2015 general election. David Cameron had pulled off no small feat by putting the Conservatives in same ballpark as Labour in 2010, and had then summoned up his best political self—open, imaginative, self-confident—to persuade Nick Clegg’s Liberal Democrats into a ground-breaking coalition government. But the 2015 election was every party for itself. Opinion polls showed relatively little change from the previous election, and the likelihood of the coalition merely reforming, but Cameron had hired Australian election guru Lynton Crosby as the Conservative Party’s campaign director, and Crosby had a clear plan.

It seems hard to imagine it now, but for a while it was thought that Ed Miliband might take Labour back to power after only five years on the outside. He made a sensible and popular pledge to tackle non-domiciled tax avoidance, which struck a chord with the voters, and the Conservatives knew he was a danger. A meeting a month before polling day had seen the Tory election chiefs gather to explore popular new policies, whether it be increasing house-building to help force down house prices, addressing the ongoing problems of the low-paid or raising more tax revenue by targeting wealthy bankers. Crosby, however, wanted to keep it simple.

All very fascinating, but voters only need to know two things about the economy: it was broken five years ago by the other lot and it’s OK again now under us.

From this simple proposition he suggested that the Conservatives focus on a small number issues which had the most deep-seated appeal: immigration, welfare reform and the possibility of Labour finding itself in a coalition with the Scottish National Party, and the latter’s leader, the wily Alex Salmond, pulling Miliband’s strings. Crosby is a brutal but effective operator and knew that focus and consistency were the chief weapons, rather than playing to the rules of the Westminster village, and so Michael Fallon, then defence secretary, talking to The Times, stripped off the gloves and jabbed right at the opposition’s chest:

Miliband stabbed his own brother in the back to become Labour leader. Now he is willing to stab the United Kingdom in the back to become prime minister.

That was the message, clear and unpolished and simple. Some commentators, pursing their lips in distaste, predicted that this was just too crass an attack line and would backfire. The voters seemed unfazed by its brutality and dwelt on the message. Crosby knew the concerns about Salmond’s influence were alive.

We knew a whole year before the campaign started that people were concerned that he would succumb too easily to powerful interest groups. The poster was just an expression of that popularly held perception. It didn’t create it, it just drew attention to it.

Polling day suggested that Crosby had produced the goods: the Conservatives won an overall majority, albeit of only 10, but it was the first Tory outright victory since 1992. the lesson seemed obvious": choose your battleground, focus on it and nothing else, make absolutely certain of your loyal followers.

I don’t have access to the most intimate councils of the Conservative Party. But one can see some signs that the government is selecting some issues which would generally be thought of as belonging to the right: immigration, and in particular the number of migrants and refugees coming to the UK across the English Channel in small boats, has been the subject of a great deal of ministerial attention. The populist home secretary, Suella Braverman KC, has pushed a very hard line on cross-Channel migration, attracting controversy over her blunt language of an “invasion” by immigrants (I looked at the sensitive vocabulary of immigration recently); and the prime minister himself had promised that new legislation will be unveiled this week to crack down on “illegal migration”.

More broadly, we have seen recurring instances of policies or merely debates which seem to hit predicted hot buttons in the “Red Wall” seats. Recently, the newly appointed deputy chairman of the Conservative Party, Lee Anderson, stated that he believed in the efficacy and advantage of the death penalty, which is a fascinating and frank approach. Anderson must know, as is obvious to any intelligent observer, that the restoration of capital punishment is not a realistic proposition; but by affirming his personal support, he makes a note of his own ideological inclinations without actually having to do anything.

One could mention other subjects which seem to cohere in a sort of populist, law-and-order conservative position: anxieties over the BBC’s liberal bias and its spending on frivolous or self-indulgent projects; opposition to radical academic reexamination of the UK’s history, especially in terms of colonialism and race relations; sometimes-concocted conflicts with a supposed “establishment”, especially represented by the civil service, the judiciary and the media. In other circumstances, this would look rather like a consolidated dog-whistle to a right-wing electorate.

So what, you might ask? After all, remember what Hippocrates, the father of medicine, said: “For extreme diseases, extreme methods of cure, as to restriction, are most suitable.” And I would agree, however reductionist, crude and depressing such a strategy may be. But I am simply not convinced that it will work, because the bases of all the political parties are shifting, without our knowing where the tectonic plates will come to rest. Some sections of opinion have ceased to award their support automatically to the Conservatives, and they do not yet seem to have been replaced by new voters.

Whatever one might think of the content and circumstances of Liz Truss’s and Kwasi Kwarteng’s Growth Plan unveiled fleetingly in September 2022, it was shattering of another ancestral bond between the Conservatives and the financial markets. This close relationship had already been frayed by Brexit and by some aspects of the response to the Covid-19 pandemic, and a huge blow was dealt by an unguarded moment in 2018 when Boris Johnson, then foreign secretary, had impatiently responded to the private sector’s concerns over government by declaring “Fuck business”. Additionally, we are seeing a refutation of the usually reliable maxim that voters drift generally to the right as they grow older: this seems not to be the case among the current top level of millennials. The results of a survey published in January for The Financial Times revealed that the UK and the US had the least conservative 35-year-olds in history, perhaps because they are experiencing economic hardship, perhaps because they have found huge challenges in the housing market and partly because all of their concerns are overlaid with anxiety about the future of the climate.

If the Conservative Party cannot be as sure as was once the case that some of these groups or demographics are foursquare behind them, and if it has still make huge headway in attracting new communities and groups, then any plan simply to play to the base is almost certain to fail, because there are not enough groups on which the Conservatives can yet forge a new coalition. It is not good enough to retreat the a comfort zone which is half a century old and hope that enough people rally to make it electorally successful; instead the party needs to create a new, forward-looking but inclusive set of policies which might give it a chance of a different but renewed electorate mandate. In short: don’t rely on your reserves if you’re not sure the reserves are present and correct.

Conclusion

I hope this has all been clear. As I say, presenting ideas for a manifesto is a difficult and time-consuming business, and there will have to be so many conversations in such different tentative alliances. To be clear, I absolutely don’t think the general election is a foregone conclusion, but I do know it will be a long and bloody slog and huge numbers of hours and days and weeks to create a government and party which look like an organisation to which the electorate might reasonably decide to lend its support.

This is not wild supposition or a first-rate Pollyanna impersonation. I am very ready to help the party where I can if it wants my help, and, however desperate the situation might be, there are always bright, capable, dedicated men and women willing to do something to safeguard the future. But we all have to understand what’s going. It is not enough to wait for the Labour leader to slip up, or to shrink our ambitions to fit a dwindling base, and Boris Johnson is the very least appropriate interpreter and champion of a modern conservatism which can catch the imagination. This essay is only preparatory work: it is not the shiny gewgaws for the magpie of the electorate, but it must, at least, be worked through and understood as good-faith advice. If you don’t have the energy to be flat-out for next 18 months, worrying at every angle and able to clear your mind and apply your natural brilliance, then that’s OK. But someone will, and it’s vital: it will be necessary, but we won't know for some months whether it’s sufficient.