The impact of Brexit on the Conservative Party provides a textbook example of the remedy being worse than the disease.

Cameron had always been a soft or small-e Eurosceptic, as much concerned with the symbolism as the substance of UK’s relationship with the EU: as Leader of the Opposition he had committed to pulling Conservative MEPs out of the European People’s Party – European Democrats grouping without thinking of the consequences for relations with other centre right leaders. As Prime Minister, however, he was (rightly or wrongly) genuinely concerned about the direction the EU seemed to be taking in the aftermath of the eurozone crisis, famously wielding the UK’s supposed veto in December 2011 in a vain attempt to head off a new fiscal compact. He calculated that a win for Remain in a referendum off the back of his negotiations would warn Europe off further encroachment on the City’s freedom of manoeuvre.

However, Cameron’s primary rationale was political. The referendum would finally put an end to the arguments over Europe that had been tearing the Conservatives apart since the 1990s and were once again provoking rebellions among backbenchers chafing against his coalition with the Liberal Democrats – most alarmingly in October 2011, when 81 of his MPs defied a three-line whip to vote for a an EU referendum. A promise to put the issue to a once-and-for-all vote would also, hoped Cameron, stop any further drift of support to UKIP, the Eurosceptic, anti-immigration party led by the charismatic right-winger Nigel Farage. Two Conservative MPs eventually defected to the party in the autumn of 2014, following its victory in elections to the European Parliament earlier in the year.

Yet neither the referendum itself, nor the UK’s eventual departure from the EU, has ultimately achieved any of those aims. Indeed, Brexit has arguably exacerbated the very problems it was supposed to solve.

True, discipline within the parliamentary Conservative Party and Cabinet was already fraying before June 2016 and Eurosceptic MPs made it very obvious very quickly that they were unimpressed with Cameron’s renegotiation – one reason why he suspended collective responsibility for the duration of the campaign in the first place. Yet the infighting grew even more intense after the result was announced, with the backbenches and Cabinet divided into Leavers and Remainers. The party has never really recovered its equilibrium.

Theresa May, who took over as Prime Minister following Cameron’s post-referendum resignation only to lose the slender Tory majority he’d won in 2015 two years later, failed to hold her government and her party together as a toxic combination of transparent leadership ambitions and genuine ideological conflict exploded in full view of an increasingly exasperated public. The parliamentary and Cabinet battles over her doomed Withdrawal Agreement effectively normalised rank disloyalty on the part of ministers and backbenchers – some of it pursued personally, some of it via an alphabet soup of ginger groups of which the arch-Eurosceptic European Research Group (ERG) was the forerunner. And that indiscretion, indiscipline, and impatience has plagued the party ever since.

Brexit has also seen the Conservative Party become less of a broad church than it used to be, at least at Westminster. From 2016 it became increasingly difficult for pro-European Conservatives to convince increasingly Eurosceptic local associations to select them as parliamentary candidates. While during the referendum campaign there were plenty of incumbent MPs who, even if they considered themselves Eurosceptics, voted Remain, anyone wanting to maintain their ministerial status and/or rise through the ranks since has had to support the UK’s departure. Then-Prime Minister Boris Johnson took things to another level entirely by ejecting twenty-one Conservatives (some permanently, some temporarily) from the parliamentary party for trying to prevent a no-deal Brexit – a move which, along with the large majority Johnson won at the 2019 General Election, helped shift the balance on both back and front benches away from the relatively moderate, mainstream, liberal Conservatism associated with the party’s electoral revival after 2005.

The requirement that Tory MPs either prove they voted Leave or else display the proverbial zeal of the convert has led to a noticeable shrinkage of the talent pool available to whoever is leading the party, whether as Prime Minister or as Leader of the Opposition. Even more importantly, it has also helped determine who is Conservative leader. In a party as leadership-driven as the Tories, this inevitably has a huge impact both on its direction and its governance and on its reputation with the public.

‘No Brexit, no Boris Johnson’ is a claim that may be ultimately impossible to prove beyond all reasonable doubt. But that the UK’s withdrawal from the EU clearly helped Johnson snatch the keys to Number 10 from Theresa May. His successors, Liz Truss (a zealous convert) and Rishi Sunak (a Brexit true-believer) also proceeded to crater the party’s electoral standing.

The fact that, eight and a half years after the referendum, there are only 121 Tory MPs sitting in the House of Commons also owes something to ongoing tendency in the Conservative Party to take a hardline view on Brexit. An attempt to appeal to Leave voters (and re-create the 2019 ‘realignment’) led to the party adopting increasingly right-wing views on migration, multiculturalism, the supposed scourge of ‘woke’ and the apparent cost and futility of moving to net zero. As a consequence, Brexit has left successive Conservative governments with insufficient bandwidth to tackle many of the challenges facing twenty-first century Britain, and the accompanying rhetoric has alienated many moderate voters.

Now in opposition, led by yet another Brexit true believer, the Conservative Party looks set to continue talking more about boats, boilers and bathrooms than the bread-and-butter issues which matter not just to voters but to the country itself. About Brexit, however, the party is now relatively silent – partly because it is now ‘done’, partly because survey evidence suggests that it is not widely regarded as a success. Whether Conservative MPs will stay quite so quiet should the Labour government try to move closer to the EU in the future will be fascinating to see.

Originally published at https://ukandeu.ac.uk/brexit-and-the-conservative-party/