‘UKIP shouldn’t be an option for any true conservative’, ConservativeHome, 29 May 2014

Posted on May 30, 2014 by tpbale

The Conservative Party only has itself to blame for the rise of UKIP – not because it ignored the pet peeves that drive Nigel Farage’s ‘people’s army’ but because, in the electorally-desperate early 2000s, it pushed the populist button itself (‘foreign land’, fuel-protests, Tony Martin, travellers, ‘are you thinking what we’re thinking?’), then suddenly vacated that ‘nasty party’ territory after 2005, only to end up in 2010 making an unrealisable promise to the electorate about reducing immigration to the tens of thousands.

In short, the Conservative Party couldn’t have teed things up more beautifully for UKIP if it had tried. That doesn’t mean, however, that Tories should vote for it.

One thing you’ll often hear from those who have done and say they’ll continue to do so is that UKIP is the party the Conservatives used to (and still ought to) be.  I beg to differ – big time.  If we look at what this government has been doing since 2010, the party that the Conservatives used to be is – surprise, surprise – still the Conservative Party.   Just look at the evidence.

You believe in making the nation’s books balance?  You’ve got a Chancellor in George Osborne who’s pursuing the single most ambitious fiscal consolidation this country has ever seen – and doing it for the most part by cutting spending rather than raising taxes, and by rolling back the welfare state but in such a way as to protect the nation’s senior citizens.

You want to preserve law and order?  Does anyone seriously think it’s at risk with Chris Grayling and Theresa May at the helm?

You believe in traditional rigour and teaching methods in education?  That’s exactly what you’re getting from Michael Gove.  And from David Willetts you’re getting a higher education system where the money follows the student and where the cost is borne by those who benefit most directly – a system that hasn’t, by the way, put people from lower income backgrounds off following their dreams.

You want to preserve the integrity of the UK?  David Cameron knows that he’s not the most popular man in Scotland and leads a party for which independence would be a positive, electorally speaking.  Yet he’s still going into bat for the Union.

You care about Britain’s national sovereignty?  Fewer governments have pursued more opt-outs and said no to more initiatives from Brussels than this one, and no-one else has a chance of delivering an in-out referendum so the country can make up its own mind.

And finally, you want to know that the UK is back in control of its borders but doesn’t cut its nose off to spite its face by denying entry to people who will make a vital contribution to the country’s future?  This government, subject to its international obligations (and, yes, such things should and do matter), has done everything that’s practically possible to balance control and Britain’s long-term economic interests.

Given all this, the only small-c conservative voter who might still be tempted by UKIP is one who believes that the proverbial man (or woman) in the street really does know better than people with experience and expertise, who prefers direct over representative democracy, and who believes in privileging the principles of libertarian non-interference over the government considering matters case-by-case.

Whatever you think of these ideas, no-one could seriously argue that they are conservative.  Indeed, any true Tory should be highly suspicious of a party which privileges ideology over facts, which dismisses the value of knowledge and judgement, which can’t admit the inevitability of historical change, and which defies the common sense on which it continually (but erroneously) claims to have some sort of monopoly.  Parties that do that end up denying climate change, wanting to do away with the NHS,  the minimum wage, and health and safety, and campaigning to bring back grammar schools – none of which are supported either by evidence or, for that matter, by a convincing majority of the public.

No, the essence of conservatism lies not in rejecting but in coming to terms with realities rooted in social change and changing popular preferences, the better to ensure that we preserve what’s worth preserving.  Not for no reason is Edmund Burke a Tory hero: it was he, after all, who warned that ‘a state without the means of some change is without the means of its conservation.’

Conservatism, unlike what’s on offer from UKIP is and always will be a living, breathing governing philosophy rather than a kneejerk, nostalgic response to whatever it is about contemporary life that people don’t like. ‘We’ll stop the world, and help you to get off’, is UKIP’s central message.  To pinch a phrase from a famous Labour politician, Nye Bevan, who spent the last few years of his left battling populists who likewise wanted the impossible and wanted it now: ‘You call that statesmanship?  I call it an emotional spasm.’

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‘How do you solve a problem like…Nigel? What Austria can teach the Conservatives about dealing with UKIP’, LSE British Politics and Policy Blog, 27 May 2011

Posted on May 30, 2014 by tpbale

If UKIP manages to do even half as well at next year’s general election as it has evidently done this time, Britain’s mainstream parties are facing nothing less than a transformation in their competitive environment. Shielded for so long by first-past-the-post, they have never really experienced a truly serious competitive threat on their far-right flank. Even when the National Front and the British National Party experienced successes, they were short-lived and the threat they presented never came close to that posed by populist radical right parties in continental Europe. There, since the 1990s, the success of those parties’ anti-system, anti-elite and anti-immigration appeals has put mainstream actors, especially on the centre-right of the political spectrum, under significant, even existential pressure – pressure that has led many of them, after attempting in vain to dismiss the whole thing as a temporary problem, to adopt what one might call a ‘radical right-lite’ strategy.

We have recently begun to see the beginnings of something similar in Britain, particularly from the Conservatives – the party most immediately threatened by UKIP’s popularity. The Tories, of course, have a long history of restrictive rhetoric and policies on immigration, driven partly by their commitment to cultural continuity and national sovereignty and partly by their concern to show how much more in touch with public opinion they are than Labour or indeed the Lib Dems. UKIP’s rise, however, has prompted the Tory leadership to further sharpen its message on immigration, as well as on the EU. UKIP’s big win at the European elections will prompt calls for Cameron and co. to go even further in this direction.

Overseas experience – particularly from one crucial case – suggests, however, that they should think twice before following that advice. The Austrian centre-right People’s Party (ÖVP) has competed against the populist radical right Freedom Party (FPÖ) over almost three decades, giving it the time and the opportunity to run the gamut of responses, all the way from trying to play it down and put it down, through aping its appeals, to, eventually, a six-year coalition government. The fact that, despite some ups and downs, the FPÖ is still very much around, scoring nearly 21 per cent at the general election in 2013 and putting in a decent performance at the Europeans this year, should be a warning to anyone in Britain who thinks they have some sort of silver-bullet solution to the threat that UKIP poses to the Conservatives.

To begin with, the Austrian experience suggests that treating the populist radical right as some sort of pariah (‘a bunch of … fruitcakes and loonies and closet racists’, as Mr Cameron famously put it) is not ultimately a sustainable strategy – particularly if the centre-right’s efforts to do so are undermined not only by the media but by people within its own ranks promoting the idea of deals with said pariah. Unfortunately, however, the Austrian experience also suggests that imitating the pariah’s policies and/or bringing it in from the cold doesn’t work either. Shifts towards a more restrictive immigration, integration and asylum policy don’t necessarily help to recapture lost votes – and they may well scare off other voters. Even worse, there is a distinct possibility that ‘banging on’ about the radical right’s signature issues only serves to prime voters to think those issues are even more pressing than they think they are already.

And then there is credibility. Experience from Austria suggests that drastic shifts on immigration and integration merely increase the electorate’s suspicion that mainstream parties are simply playing politics, making them less likely to believe they really care, let alone have any consistent, deliverable policies on the issue. Austria, especially in recent years, also shows us that trying to have it both ways – talking tough on asylum and ‘bad’ immigration while promoting integration and an open market for highly-skilled workers – may not help the centre-right much in this respect either, at least in the short term. No surprise, then, that the Conservatives’ attempts to do just since 2010 that seem to have made very little impression on those Tory voters who appear to have jumped ship to UKIP.

Austrian experience also suggests that such shifts stand little chance of converting many of those voters who would vote for radical right parties anyway. Since those parties can make a good claim to ‘own’ the issues of immigration, integration and asylum, adopting their agenda risks confirming rather than eroding their reputation for speaking truth to power. The Conservatives have and will always fail to outbid UKIP when it comes to its core issues because, like Austria’s populist radical right, it will always be able – and willing – to go one better. In fact, every step in its direction on the part of the Tories will allow UKIP, like the FPÖ, to point to its ability to influence mainstream parties to ‘do the right thing’, therefore making it worth voting for. Meanwhile, any mainstream party which takes too restrictive a stance may well be denying both the nation and itself the benefits of higher economic growth.

But it is not only its consequences for votes and policy that makes such a strategy hazardous. It has consequences for getting into and staying in government too. The ÖVP operates in a PR system; thus, if the FPÖ does well enough, then there is always a possibility of a centre-right/radical right coalition. The Conservatives, however, lack such a safety net – one that that might allow them, like some centre-right parties in other parts of Europe, to gain or hang onto power even with a relatively unimpressive vote share. Conversely, the Tories need to worry about the possibility that cosying up to UKIP might hamper another deal with the Lib Dems, who (unless they really are prepared to be the gift that keeps on giving to their coalition partners) have probably conceded just about as much as they are likely to concede on immigration and Europe. In the longer run, and assuming, for the sake of argument, that a series of hung parliaments eventually produces irresistible pressure for a change of electoral systems, the Austrian experience suggests that co-option into coalition of the populist radical right is no more than a temporary solution anyway.

Given all this, the obvious lesson from Austria for British Conservatives is a simple one – but no less important for that. They should avoid investing too much time, effort and attention in desperately trying to cure a condition that, in all likelihood, can only be managed. UKIP can hardly be dismissed as a distraction. But nor is it going to be easy to dispose of – not if it continues to be well-led and well-covered by a fascinated media, and not while there are significant proportions of the electorate uncomfortable with the cultural, social and economic change which globalisation makes inevitable. After all, UKIP is no anomaly; it is the British example of a Europe-wide phenomenon to which no-one has yet found the answer, and maybe never will.

None of this means that a touch of rhetorical reassurance from the Conservatives to their worried former supporters won’t help a little – but only if it doesn’t lead to promises that can’t be kept or to alienating the many commercial enterprises (and indeed citizens) that thrive on cultural, social and economic change. Better instead to focus on what mainstream centre-right parties generally do best – managing the economy, providing public services that are sufficient without being extravagant, balancing the concerns of traditionalist voters with the requirements of business, and painting their centre-left rivals as profligate soft-touches who couldn’t organise the proverbial piss-up in a brewery – Austrian, British or otherwise.

This post is an edited version of an academic article ‘And it’s good night Vienna. How (not) to deal with the populist radical right: the Conservatives, UKIP and some lessons from the heartland’ by Oliver Gruber and Tim Bale, available now as an early access publication from the journal British Politics.

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David Cameron’s next EU challenge: renegotiation, Telegraph, 26 May 2014

Posted on May 30, 2014 by tpbale

Tory MPs may have agreed not to panic in the light of Ukip’s big win, but that doesn’t mean David Cameron isn’t going to come under a huge amount of pressure from them in the coming days and weeks to do something, anything, to show he’s got the message. One of their demands is bound to be that the Prime Minister not only bring forward the date of any referendum – but also spell out in more detail exactly what it is he wants out of his renegotiation of the UK’s relationship with the EU.

In fact, of course, the kind of EU which Cameron – indeed, all Tory moderates and pragmatists – would feel reasonably content to belong to should be no mystery to anyone by now. After all, he himself set it out in his Bloomberg speech in January 2013. He still wants what he said he wanted back then, namely a 21st Century EU that is “a means to an end – prosperity, stability, the anchor of freedom and democracy both within Europe and beyond her shores – not an end in itself.”

In other words, it’s an EU which stresses internal and external competition, which acknowledges diversity and operates rules and structures that don’t discriminate against those member states not signed up to full-blown currency, banking, and fiscal union. It makes sure that things better done domestically are not being done by Brussels and, if they are, makes moves to put things right.

So far, so easy. But what is more difficult for Conservatives like Cameron who remain broadly in favour of continued membership is what the UK should do if this isn’t the kind of European Union that the other 27 member states actually want or at least feel can be achieved.

For the moment, if he has done nothing else, Cameron has postponed any immediate need to come up with an answer to this awkward question. He has also, with a little help from Angela Merkel, been able to give the impression that the UK, in its bid to renegotiate its relationship and repatriate powers, is not without friends and allies.

But anyone who can resist the lure of wishful thinking or is halfway familiar with the countries in question – Germany, the Nordics, some of the post-communist member states – knows that, forced to choose, they will choose Europe over helping out their new best friend. Unlike the UK, or at least unlike the Conservative Party, they see no going back even if they would like to see some serious changes made.

That is not to say, however, that they will not give a little. The Conservatives’, the country’s and indeed the continent’s best hope is surely some sort of deal done on the basis of devolving powers that a decent majority of member states agree need devolving.

The problem will come if Cameron concludes that the only deal worth having (or at least worth trying to sell back home) is based on Britain getting something that most other member states don’t get. Not unreasonably, they will see special treatment of that kind as freeriding and therefore won’t agree. The same goes for a deal which involves unpicking budgets or serious reform of the CAP. There are simply too many payees – and, whatever the UK thinks, not enough seriously angry payers – to see that happen.

Sensible Conservatives – the kind who still believe they should be Britain’s natural party of government rather than some sort of revolutionary vanguard – know in their hearts what the party and the Prime Minister should do. Starting with the vision of the EU he laid out in his Bloomberg speech, he should figure out what other member states will put up with and then work backwards from there, selling whatever that may be as just what he wanted in the first place and exactly what the country really needs.

That will entail some seriously skilful behind-the-scenes (as opposed to megaphone) diplomacy and, although nobody is talking about a full-blown reconciliation, trying to rebuild some of the bridges that were burned by leaving the EPP group in the European Parliament. The very least the Tories can do on this score is not to allow their desperation to expand (or even simply ensure the survival) their own ECR group to tempt them into offering membership to the populist rivals of the mainstream centre-Right parties whose support Cameron will need for any reform programme worth the name. Most importantly, if the Prime Minister wants to keep Angela Merkel onside anyway, they mustn’t touch the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) with a bargepole.

None of this is pure. Nor is it pretty. But it is politics, at least as practised in an increasingly interdependent continent – and in the real world, too. Those Conservatives who prefer the fantasy version need to grow up and get serious. Cameron’s problem, and therefore Europe’s problem, however, is what his party needs to do and what it actually does are too often two very different things.

This is an edited extract from The Modernisers’ Manifesto, just published by Bright Blue

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The Conservatives will face many challenges after the votes are counted in the European Parliament election, LSE British Politics and Policy Blog, 9 May 2014

Posted on May 30, 2014 by tpbale

To say the Tories are unlikely to do as well in May 2014 as they did in June 2009 is a bit of an understatement. Five years ago they topped the poll, getting just under 4.2 million votes or nearly 28% of the total, and giving them 26 seats. This year it looks like they will not only finish third but may not even achieve 25% of the vote.

In the absolute nightmare scenario, the Tories would be reduced to barely double-figures. In the worst-case it will be around 15 seats. They will be hoping, and probably expecting, however, to get a little closer to 20 than that.  Anything over 20 would still be embarrassing but could probably be spun as something other than devastating – especially if the quirks of the regional electoral system allow David Cameron can at least claim to have beaten Nigel Farage in seats, if not in votes.

Whether the reaction on the Conservative backbenches and at the grassroots will be worse if UKIP tops the poll or if Labour comes first instead is a moot point. Rationally, the second of these two outcomes should probably worry the party more than the first. But many Tories have long since left rationality behind when it comes to Europe and to UKIP. There will be bedwetting, if not blood. Right-wingers will demand policy changes and even those who are less zealous will call for Cameron to get a grip. The most obvious way he can appear to do this is by holding a reshuffle in which Grant Shapps is relieved of the Party Chairmanship and some media-friendly right-wingers (plus some supposedly salt-of-the-earth types) are promoted into the Cabinet or at least on to the front bench. If Number Ten plays things true to form it will – assuming it hasn’t already shot its bolt during the campaign itself – respond by appearing to harden its stance on renegotiation with Europe and conjuring up yet more ‘tough, new’ measures on immigration, ideally ones which involve limiting benefits that can be claimed by migrants from EU member states.

The hope has to be that this will buy time while the bounce that Farage will undoubtedly get from giving Clegg, and now Cameron, a bloody nose fades. If UKIP’s leader has also managed to do the same to Ed Miliband by beating Labour into second place, then things might be a little easier. In that event, it may be possible – especially now that the economy seems to have turned the corner – to persuade the party, and the party in the media, that the ‘real losers’ of this election are Labour and the Lib Dems. Polling should help if it eventually starts to suggest that a lot of those who lent their support to UKIP did so only temporarily, largely in order to give the government a good kicking before settling down again in the run-up to the general election in a year’s time.

It remains a possibility that Cameron will surprise everyone with a genuinely dramatic move, such as declaring in terms that he would like to be shot of the Liberal Democrats sooner rather than later. But it remains only an outside possibility. Rather more likely is a renewal of previous speculation as to who will take over from Cameron should he lose the general election. This is damaging because it is distracting – but probably not fatally so. After all, nobody seriously thinks anyone else but the current occupant of Number 10 will be leading the Party into the next election.

As far as the campaign – such as it is – goes, it will largely focus on the home front. But there is one continental concern that Cameron will have to watch. Since the Conservatives are not a member of any of the big party groups putting up a candidate for the presidency, the Conservatives, like UKIP, do not have a dog in that particular race, which is bound to increase the temptation for some Tories to cite it as an example of the supposedly remote, self-deluded and self-aggrandizing second-raters who want to run Britain from Brussels. Too much overt criticism by Tories of the EPP’s pick, Jean-Claude Juncker, may well irritate other centre-right parties, with whom Cameron needs to keep on reasonably friendly terms if he is to stand any chance of achieving a reform package he can sell at home during a referendum campaign in 2017.

The main concern on this score, however, will come after the campaign is over and bargaining begins. And it involves – perhaps inevitably given Germany’s pre-eminence – Angela Merkel. She is absolutely determined that the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) – the German Eurosceptic party which, despite its limitations, presents a challenge to her CDU – not be lent legitimacy and credibility by being invited by Tory MEPs to join their European Conservatives and Reformist (ECR) group in the European Parliament.

The trouble for the Prime Minister is that the ECR, in order to conform with EP rules that official recognition and funding only goes to groups with at least 25 MEPs from at least seven member states, may, in the wake of a contest that is likely to wipe out some of its existing components, be casting around desperately for some half-way respectable allies. All this could mean Cameron having to choose between, on the one hand, a Tory delegation in Brussels stranded, friendless and powerless, outside the group system or, on the other, sacrificing virtually any chance he has of enlisting Merkel’s help with his renegotiation efforts.  These elections are easily dismissed but they matter to the Conservatives – not just domestically but because domestic politics and diplomacy are now inextricably intertwined.

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‘Are Tory activists weeding out “moderate” MPs?’, Political Studies Association Blog, 6 March, 2014 (with Paul Webb)

Posted on March 16, 2014 by tpbale

When two Conservative MPs were deselected in rapid succession by their local constituency associations, it marked to some a welcome assertion of grassroots rights and power.  To others, it was no such thing.  Instead the move was an inevitable consequence of what happens when a party’s membership drops so low that the only people left at local level are the zealots –  the ultra-Thatcherite ‘Tory boys’ (and girls!), the ‘blue-rinse dragons’, the ‘Colonel Blimps’,  the ‘mad swivel-eyed loons’.  As a result no independently-minded, moderate MP could sleep safe in his or her seat any longer.

In fact, when one looks back over the last hundred years, it soon becomes obvious that we’re not witnessing anything particularly unprecedented.  There has always been potential for friction between local associations and their man or woman at Westminster – sometimes for  ideological or policy reasons, though more often than not because the MP in question has somehow brought the party into disrepute or isn’t seen to be pulling his or her weight.

That said, those who argue that the potential for such friction has grown as parties shrink may have a point – or at least one worth our consideration.  After all, that argument accords not just with common wisdom but with one of the most pervasive (though not necessarily accurate) assumptions held by political scientists interested in parties.  After all, May’s Law of Curvilinear Disparity (apologies for the jargon) holds that a party’s activists are inevitably more radical (and some would say less realistic) than either its voters or its MPs and leaders.

So what does the evidence say?  For starters, it’s undoubtedly true that Tory Party membership has shrunk, not just from its high point in the early 1950s but also in the last twenty years.  It was around 400,000 in 1994, when the first academic survey of the Party was published.  By 2010, around the time of another survey – this one conducted for a book on the Party’s attitudes to women – it had dropped to 177,000.  By 2013 (the year in which we conducted our survey of the Tory grassroots), CCHQ, after being dragged kicking and screaming into releasing the figure by a concerted campaign by website Conservative Home, claimed that the figure now stood at 134,000– which, given the rate of decline in recent years, seems a little high, although we will perhaps be able to gauge its accuracy if the Party holds a leadership contest in the event that it fails to hang on to Number Ten after the next election.

But what about grassroots attitudes?  Is it really the case that, as the tide has gone out on membership, the only people left on the beach are a bunch of Eurosceptic, misogynistic, homophobic, climate-change deniers?  And has the rank and file actually changed that much ideologically over the last two decades?

There is no doubt that the current membership of the Conservative Party is fiercely Eurosceptic –so much so that rather too many of them for Mr Cameron’s comfort are tempted by UKIP.  True, a majority of them could probably be persuaded to vote to stay in the EU if the Prime Minister could make a convincing claim to have renegotiated this country’s relationship with Brussels.  But they would take a lot more persuading to select anyone remotely resembling a Europhile as a candidate and, if they are currently represented in Parliament, would really rather their current MP, if he or she shared such heretical views, didn’t voice them too loudly. 

On the environment, they can hardly be described as thoroughgoing friends of the earth.  We found that just over half of them opposed their own government’s setting up of a Green investment bank to fund solar power and wind farm projects – twice the proportion that supported the idea.  Meanwhile nine out of ten of them approved of its scrapping the rises in fuel duty intended to curb carbon emissions.  Whether or not Tim Yeo was right to point to his environmental campaigning as one of the factors that did for him, then, who can say?  But it probably didn’t do him any favours.

As for homophobia, it is hard to believe in the light of the fact that one of the key figures in Yeo’s deselection was looking forward to his gay son’s own same-sex marriage, that the issue had a much of a bearing on his motives.  However, it may just have played a part in the thinking of other people involved in this and other deselections.  We found, for instance, only one in four members supporting the introduction of gay marriage but six out of ten opposing it (four of them strongly).  Meanwhile, only one in ten wanted to see more gay and lesbian MPs representing the Tories in parliament, while getting on for a third wanted to see fewer of them.

However, when it comes to attitudes to female MPs– one of the issues that supposedly (but only supposedly) played a part in Anne McIntosh’s deselection – the stereotype simply doesn’t stand up, not if our respondents actually mean what they say (and given their disdain for political correctness it is unlikely they lied to us on this one). True, a quarter of members say they are happy with a situation which sees women make up just 16 per cent of the Conservative Party in the Commons.  But the number wanting to see fewer women is minuscule, while just over half of all members would actually like to see more.  That represents a drop on the proportion saying the same in 2009, but that in itself is possibly a response to the number of female MPs rising considerably after the general election.  And the tiny proportion of members saying they’d like to see fewer MPs has reduced by two-thirds between now and then.

And what about where they stand on the left-right spectrum?  How has that changed over the last twenty years?  Not as much as one might think, is the answer. When we asked them in 2013 to place themselves on a left-right spectrum running from zero to ten (with 0 representing far left and 10 far right), the average Tory member placed him or herself at 8.4 – exactly the same place as in 2009 and only a whisker away from where the average member placed him or herself (ie at 8.2) in 1992.

Of course, it could be that those who are most active in the party – the people who attend its local fundraisers, who canvass at elections, stand as councillors, or go to association committee meetings – are also the most radical. This would matter because they are precisely the kind of people behind the attempts (not all of them successful) to get rid of sitting MPs.

We found that only three per cent of all Tory members could be described as hard-core activists in the sense that they put in more than 10 hours a week on behalf of the party – a proportion that only increases to seven per cent if we expand the definition to include those who put in over five hours, although it is actually higher than the one researchers uncovered in the early 1990s.   It is certainly the case that this hard core is more likely to take a dim view of the coalition and feel less respected by the leadership than their inactive counterparts. But are they markedly more right wing?  The answer is no: those giving more than 5 hours a week of their time to the party have an identical mean score to those giving less than 5 hours on the left-right scale (8.4). It makes little difference if we substitute composite attitudinal scales constructed from responses to various questions designed to tap the nuances of left-right positioning, and neither does it change much if we define ‘core activists’ as only those doing more than 10 hours or 20 hours per week; the activists are not significantly more right-wing.

It may, then, be tempting to think that, as the Conservative Party’s membership shrinks, it will necessarily become a more hostile environment for sitting MPs who don’t share the views of an inevitably more right-wing rank-and-file.  But it may well be mistaken, too.  Moderate MPs who work hard – not just in the House but at maintaining friendly relations with the folks back home – can probably sleep fairly soundly.  The Tory Party may no longer be a particularly broad church but maybe it hasn’t become a sect just yet.

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‘David Cameron shouldn’t bank on Angela Merkel to sort out his EU issues’ Guardian, 26 February, 2014

Posted on March 16, 2014 by tpbale

Angela Merkel and David Cameron didn’t get off to the greatest of starts: one of his earliest decisions as party leader was to pull Conservative MEPs out of Merkel’s party’s group in the European parliament. But their relationship seems to have improved markedly since he became prime minister, so much so that the German chancellor’s trip to the UK is being treated, especially by those Conservatives who hope the EU can be reformed rather than abandoned, as the visit of an ally and not an enemy.

Wishful thinking, warn some of Cameron’s more candid friends, as well as his dedicated band of Europhobe detractors. Merkel may be the most powerful person in Europe, but that doesn’t mean she can perform miracles. She also leads a country that, like any other, will ultimately act in what it perceives to be its national interests. For most Germans, this means preserving a political economic union that has helped deliver peace, prosperity and democracy. Besides, Cameron mustn’t forget that she governs alongside the centre-left SPD, and they make our own Labour party look like a bunch of wild-eyed sceptics.

Put bluntly, then, the argument is that while Merkel may well agree with a lot of what Cameron would like to do to the EU, she is constrained by country and coalition: she would if she could, but she can’t. What all this forgets, however, is that there is another equally important reason why Germany’s chancellor won’t ride to the rescue of Britain’s PM: ideology.

It is all too easy to think that just because Merkel and Cameron head up centre-right parties, those parties think pretty much alike. But if that were the case, then why, for instance, did so many Tory MEPs feel so uncomfortable in the Merkel-allied European People’s party-European Democrats grouping? It wasn’t just about differences on EU integration; it was because they were Conservatives in an alliance dominated by Christian Democrats. Cameron’s Conservatism and Merkel’s Christian Democracy represent related but in the end fundamentally different world views.

For the contemporary Conservative everything begins with the individual, whereas for the Christian Democrat, people are profoundly embedded in the collective – most obviously in associations and interest groups including (whisper it softly) trade unions. The job of the state, for Christian Democrats, is actively to bring together, reconcile, regulate and harmonise the needs and demands of the so-called “social partners” in more or less corporatist fashion. Not for them the stripped-down, hollowed-out affair which is the aim of all-too-many contemporary Conservatives. Nor for them the excessive centralisation which, for example, prevents local government raising and spending most of its own money, or sees schools run direct from Whitehall. Or, indeed, the social exclusion that comes with poverty wages, lack of youth training, and a welfare system run on the cheap by the state for the supposedly deserving poor rather than by stakeholders for everyone.

Christian Democracy – the clue is in the name, as well as in the insistence of those who profess it, that they are a centre rather than a rightwing party. Yes, they embrace private property and the market. But with affluence comes responsibility: the market is still the social market, and there is more to life than materialism.

And there is also a limit to the demonisation of outsiders. Of course immigration should be controlled – and successive Christian Democratic governments can hardly be held up as shining examples when it comes to the treatment of Germany’s Turkish (and therefore predominantly Muslim) population. But there remains at the heart of their worldview the desire “to turn strangers into friends”, to treat those fleeing poverty and oppression with Christian charity and compassion. Likewise, Christian Democracy is an inherently transnational rather than nationalist creed. For its adherents the EU is not simply a marriage of convenience but a statement of faith – the embodiment of the ideal, harmonious, federal polity writ large.

One can of course argue that there has been a degree of convergence in recent years. Some of the talk from Conservatives about the “big society” sounded pretty Christian Democratic. And for their part, Christian Democrats have moved towards a more liberal conception of the market and been obliged to come to terms with aspects of the secular, permissive society that many – though clearly not all – Conservatives were much quicker to embrace.

But there are limits, and they will only become more and more obvious as Cameron embarks on his mission to change Europe or else leave it. He and Merkel may not be chalk and cheese, but they’ll never be birds of a feather.

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‘Getting the populists’ message’, Policy Network, 20 February 2014

Posted on March 16, 2014 by tpbale

The power of populism lies principally in its appeal to our emotions, or so we’re often told.  That may be true – but only up to a point.  Focusing on populism’s emotional appeal allows us to forget that much of populism’s popularity rests on the fact that, to coin a phrase, ‘it stands to reason’.  “Not enough council houses, school places or jobs to go round?  Well, what about all those immigrants ‘flooding’ into the country? Coincidence? I don’t think so.” Sure, that logic may be simplistic, flawed, twisted even.  But it is logic nonetheless – and powerful, too.

Likewise, those who worry about populist parties and politicians complain bitterly that they thrive on exaggeration – the big lie, if you like.  But, again, those critics are only half right.  And, again, they are buying into a kind of common wisdom that risks making populism harder rather than easier to combat.  Continually moaning about populists blowing things out of proportion only serves to deflect our attention from an uncomfortable truth, namely that at least some of what those parties and politicians are saying may well contain more than a grain of truth.

Consider the following.  All staples of populist discourse about parliament and government as they currently stand.  All stuff that’s pretty standard if you listen not just to anyone from UKIP for more than a minute or two but to floating voters in focus groups, too.  And all, we should have the courage to admit, actually pretty hard to deny – at least completely.

Westminster is populated by a political class which increasingly looks and sounds, at least to those on average incomes with only a passing interest or acquaintance in its goings-on, pretty much the same irrespective of which parties its members happen to belong to.  Politics has become, if not a rich man’s sport, then a graduate profession that seems to have effectively removed ordinary working people from the picture.

OK, so a few particularly egregious cases of expenses fiddling resulted in politicians facing criminal charges or being forced out of parliament.  But there are a whole bunch of people still there who did things that most people would regard as dodgy and who might well have met the same fate as their more unfortunate counterparts had they not been lucky enough to be well in with their party leaders, their local party, and the print media.

Governments of both parties have, for whatever reason, been unable or unwilling to effectively punish people whose actions, whether they are foreign criminals or risk-taking bankers, have proved seriously harmful.  Whatever happened to fairness?

Now, clearly, there are plenty of people working in and around parliament who don’t fit this description, who’ve never had a single allegation made against them (let alone proved) when it comes to expenses, and who’ve either never served in government or remain as frustrated as anyone else at its seeming inability to turn the justifiable rage of the electorate into concrete sanctions.  It’s hardly surprising, then, that, if you are one of those people, your first reaction is just a little bit defensive.

But that may well be a big mistake.  We spend an awful lot of our time working out how to defeat populists rather than listening to what they’re saying and wondering whether they might, in fact, be telling us something we actually need to hear if we’re to stand any chance whatsoever of re-forging some sort of connection between the public and political system that’s supposed to serve them.  Nigel Farage, like others of his ilk all around continental Europe, should be seen not just as force to be reckoned with, an opponent to defeat, but as a canary in a coal mine.  

We need to think hard, then, about how we get people into parliament who look and sound more like the bulk of the electorate rather than the bulk of those who are already there.  We need to make sure that, should politics in the UK ever take a hit on anything like the scale represented by the expenses scandal, we really do clean out the house rather than hang a few sad souls out to dry while others are allowed simply to pay up quietly and stick around.  And, before the next shit hits the financial fan, or the next foreign criminal escapes deportation on what the public see as spurious human rights grounds, we need to think about legislation that, even if it doesn’t allow us to exact simple vengeance, then at least reflects our values.

Populism, in other words, is sending us a signal, delivering us a message.  Unless we get that message rather than simply thinking up better ways to shoot the messenger, then its appeal – whether it be emotional or rational – will only grow and grow.

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‘Should cagey Osborne flex his electoral pectorals?’, The Conversation, 4 February 2014

Posted on February 9, 2014 by tpbale

Who lives at Number Ten Downing Street? The answer is of course… George Osborne. While his official residence may be next door at Number Eleven, it is he and not David Cameron who lives in the flat above the Prime Minister’s place. Perhaps this should come as no surprise. After all, Osborne is routinely described as “that most political of chancellors”. Everything he does and says is dedicated, say friends and foes alike, not just to nursing the nation’s economy back to health but to ensuring that the Conservatives are returned to power at the general election next year.

But is Osborne really so very different to those who have occupied his post in the past? It’s not as if, prior to his doing it, the job tended to go to economists or accountants. Chancellors have always been politicians and they have therefore always been political. Yes, they have tried do their best by the British economy but they have been equally set on winning elections too. In any case, the two things are normally seen as synonymous: get the economy right and the voters will reward you and your party, right?

Wrong. Looking back over the decades since the World War II, it seems as though the key to success lies not so much in getting the economy right as getting the timing right. Chancellors, particularly those who write their memoirs, might like to give the impression that they were locked in battle with a prime minister whose only concern was to get his or her government through the next election and hang the consequences. But, more often than not, the arguments between Number Ten and Number Eleven are about how best to align the electoral and the business cycle rather than about what is necessarily best for the country.

True, concerns about one’s legacy play a part. Rab Butler’s election-winning generosity in 1955 and Reggie Maudling’s “dash for growth” nearly a decade later left both men nursing sore heads and a reputational hit which left the top job out of their reach.

The economist next door

Things also depend quite a lot on the prime minister a chancellor serves.

Those who know a lot – or think they know a lot – about economics are the trickiest. Maudling had replaced Selwyn Lloyd who had been continually under pressure from Macmillan (himself a former chancellor) to go for growth. Jim Callaghan, who replaced Maudling when Labour won in 1964, had to put up with a good deal of interference from Harold Wilson, an economist by profession. He got the party through the 1966 election largely by blaming the Tories for his dire inheritance only to experience the humiliation of devaluation in 1967. That it was Wilson’s humiliation too meant Roy Jenkins – probably a better match for Wilson intellectually anyway – had a much freer hand than his unfortunate predecessor. Not that it did him much good in the end; it was Callaghan, not Jenkins, who succeeded Wilson as prime minister in 1975.

Jenkins is often cited as the shining example of a chancellor who took tough decisions, overseeing what at the time anyway passed for a brutal package of spending cuts and insisting on an export- rather than a consumer-led recovery. His reputation among commentators (although not among his colleagues) was only enhanced when, in 1970, he supposedly refused to buy an election by delivering the usual pre-election giveaway budget.

The reality was rather different. For one thing, Jenkins was not expecting Wilson to call the election as early as he did, so the slow-burn, pro-growth measures he snuck into his budget did not have sufficient time to work. For another, his decision not to go hell-for-leather was essentially a bet that Labour would be given the credit for acting responsibly by a grateful electorate.

Trusting voters to reward actual rather than easy virtue is rarely a good idea – particularly if the economy upon which a chancellor is making his pitch seems stronger in the abstract than it does in the particular. This, as Osborne (a history buff) will no doubt be painfully aware, was very much the case for Jenkins. The statistics were, for the most part, impressive; but two years during which prices had seemed to be rising faster than earnings meant that far too many voters were still feeling the pain rather than looking forward to the gain.

That said, there are plenty of examples of chancellors who have ignored the proverbial lessons of history and ended up making the same mistakes, either losing elections or shredding their own reputations or, in some cases, both. Tony Barber allowed himself to be bullied by Ted Heath – as dominant a prime minister in his day as Wilson before him and Thatcher after him – into a Maudling-style dash for growth, only to be forced into choking off an unsustainable (and now eponymous) boom just as the prime minister gambled everything (and lost) on a snap election in February 1974.

Slamming on the brakes

Dennis Healey, Callaghan’s chancellor, got a grip on spending and inflation (with the help of the IMF). Until, that is, his boss surprised everyone (including him) by not going to the country in the autumn of 1978 – a move which required another round of pay restraint from the unions that Healey simply couldn’t deliver. And after Geoffrey Howe – surely the exception that proves the rule – did the business for both the economy and Margaret Thatcher in 1983, her second chancellor, Nigel Lawson, stepped far too heavily on the accelerator in 1987 and ended up having to slam on the brakes way too hard before resigning (supposedly in protest at prime ministerial interference).

Ken Clarke, will go down in history along with Roy Jenkins as a chancellor who did right by the economy but, by balancing the books and pursuing a sustainable rather than a consumer-led recovery, helped lose his party the election. Clarke, like Jenkins, calculated that some sort of dash for growth would have backfired politically as well as economically – and, given the Tories’ loss of credibility after the ERM debacle, he was probably right. Like Jenkins, he must have hoped – in vain, as it turned out – that he’d get at least a little gratitude from voters. Deep down, however, one suspects he knew that no amount of give-aways and goodies would be enough to beat Blair and Brown, and so decided that, if defeat were to come, it would be an honourable one.

The same perhaps was true of Alistair Darling. And unlike Clarke, he had to spend almost as much of his time fighting off the man next door as he did fighting off a domestic and global depression. Gordon Brown, after ten years as one of the most powerful and electorally successful chancellors this country has ever seen, simply wasn’t prepared to let go, but Darling somehow found the strength to stick to his guns. Had he not done so, and simply buckled in the face of Brown’s delusionary attempt to draw the old dividing lines between “Tory cuts” and “Labour investment”, his party may have gone down to an even bigger (and infinitely more dishonourable) defeat than it eventually did in 2010.

George Osborne, one suspects, is not a good loser – at least not while he feels he has a chance of winning. Clearly he still does. Even economists whose hearts beat on the right know that the growth he can finally boast about has been achieved by a combination of phenomenally cheap money, a below-the-radar relaxation of austerity and, worse, a reliance on the housing market and on consumption and household indebtedness that will store up trouble in the future.

But Osborne has several things going for him that some of his predecessors did not.

First, barring a complete breakdown of relations with the Lib Dems, he knows when the election will be, making the thorny issue of timing ever so slightly less thorny. Second, he is working alongside rather than for or (as was sometimes the case with Gordon Brown) against his boss – and his boss knows even less about the economy than he does. Third, as a politician who would one day like to occupy the downstairs as well as the upstairs of Number Ten, he knows chancellors who preside over an honourable defeat never recover to win the leadership of their party. The “Catch-22”, however, is that chancellors who take the less honourable route hardly ever do either.

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‘Inside the Tory Mind’, Progress, 3 February 2014

Posted on February 9, 2014 by tpbale

The past often sheds light on the present, either by throwing up stark contrasts or by revealing eerie similarities. Stuart Ball’s book,  Portrait of a Party: The Conservative Party in Britain 1918-1945, which came out last year, provides plenty of both. But, ultimately, for anyone interested in understanding today’s Tory party, it is how things have changed, rather than how they have stayed the same, that is most striking.

Some things about the Conservative party in the interwar years do seem incredibly familiar. There is the generous funding and the often careless spending. There is the absolute determination of constituency associations to preserve their local autonomy. There is the fact that its grassroots grow strongest not in the marginals but in the safe suburban and rural seats where they are needed least. There is the sense of leaders trying simultaneously to balance the needs of a largely moderate electorate with the demands of a membership convinced that there is so much more that a Tory-led government should be doing to prevent the country going to rack and ruin. There is the disproportionate influence of the rightwing press. And there are the faultlines running right through the party over, first, Britain’s relationship with the rest of the word and, second, the pros and cons of coalition.

Yet it is by no means all a case of plus ça change – especially when it comes to the party at Westminster. Of course, even there, not everything is different. The front and backbenches are still dominated by thoroughly middle-class, white men. Most of them can rely on the support of their local associations as long as they live relatively conventional private lives and do not seriously threaten to bring down a Conservative government. And progress through the ranks still depends rather more on orthodoxy, reliability and perceived competence than it does on flights of oratory, flashes of intellectual brilliance, and fighting for one’s principles come what may.

What has changed, however, is the nature of what Ball calls the ‘mainstream’ or ‘undemonstrative majority’. This is the bulk of the party to whom few voters, journalists and even their own leaders could necessarily put a name, but who help determine who becomes the party’s leader and set the limits on what he or she can do. Of course, even in the 1920s and 1930s, Ball reminds us, this crucial part of the parliamentary Conservative party ‘was not a monolith but a mosaic’. Nevertheless, one or two things could be confidently said of most of its members. First, while ‘their time as an MP was a valued element in their life … it was not the essential part of their livelihood or sense of identity.’ Second, while ‘they had some sympathy with the [much smaller] wings on either side’ of them, they ‘regarded those on the left as naïve and inexperienced, and those on the right as sound in instinct but out of touch with reality’.

Nowadays, many Tory MPs continue to dabble in their previous profession or else keep their fingers in the various pies that constituted their business interests before entering the House. However, the majority at least begin believing they might make an essentially full-time career out of politics and that said career could (and, if there is any justice in the world, surely should) eventually see them sitting around the cabinet table. Yes, of course they also have what intellectual snobs like to call ‘a hinterland’. Whatever the public likes to think, they are, after all, human beings like the rest of us. But, by and large, they live, breathe, sleep and eat politics – a habit now fed further by a media, social and otherwise, that operates on the same 24/7 schedule.

As a result, the bulk of today’s Tory MPs – not just the zealous minority on their fringes – have more opinions on more questions than ever before. Moreover, unlike their relatively deferential interwar ancestors, they are also convinced that those opinions are no less valuable than those of their leaders. Gone is that golden age where honourable members assumed that their elders and betters were bound to know more about what was really going on than they did and should, therefore, be trusted for the most part to get on with it.

Mapping the distribution of those more frequently held and more frequently expressed opinions on the government benches, then, may be a fascinating and possibly worthwhile exercise. And political scientists will no doubt continue to do it, exploiting dissenting votes, speeches in the chamber, signatures on Early Day Motions and even Twitter to show the strength of a bewildering variety of sometimes cross-cutting, sometimes overlapping, strains. Hard Eurosceptics and soft Eurosceptics, social conservatives and social liberals and libertarians, modernisers and traditionalists, moderates and neoliberals, neocons and realists, hawks and doves – you pays your money, you takes your choice and you does your cluster analysis. In the end, however, the precise tendencies to which MPs are seen to belong may matter less than the fact that so many of them can now be meaningfully categorised as belonging to those tendencies rather than to some amorphous ‘solid centre’, as well as the fact that so many of them now believe their views ought to weigh heavily with their leader.

All this makes the present-day parliamentary party much harder to lead than it was before, particularly if the man or woman at the top has, first, fewer plum jobs (or even dumb jobs) to dole out and, second, is unable to persuade those who are left out that things will be better after the next election. But David Cameron’s task is made all the harder by the fact that today’s mainstream majority, inasmuch as it exists at all, is no longer that mainstream, at least relative to the electorate as a whole. True, when it comes to issues like law and order and immigration, they are pretty much on the money; but on the supposedly inherent superiority of all things private and unregulated many, many voters think very differently than they do.

In the mid-1970s, the solid centre chose Margaret Thatcher not so much because they agreed with her but because they admired her guts and could see no realistic alternative. Since then, a combination of generational replacement and an unprecedented premium on being ‘one of us’ has seen to it that most Tory MPs regard the tiny minority of their number who could be labelled as on the left of the party (more than 10 but fewer than 20 is a best guess) not just as ‘naïve and inexperienced’ but as barely Conservative. Those on the right, however, are still seen as ‘sound in instinct’ but (barring a few notorious exceptions) only rarely regarded as ‘out of touch with reality’. Indeed, the right – free-market, small-state, low-tax, tight-borders, tougher-sentences, eco- and Euro-sceptical – is where the solid centre of the party now comfortably resides.

Likewise their leader. The prime minister, after all, is no more a ‘compassionate conservative’ – if by that one means some sort of wishy-washy patrician and pragmatic centrist – than the average Conservative MP. That, to hear them talk sometimes, you would hardly know it arises from the fact that the average Tory MP today not only has ideas but (as his or her interwar counterparts would have seen it) has ideas above his or her station. Put that together with the panic over the United Kingdom Independence party, with a sense that the country’s dire financial situation offers a once-in-a-generation opportunity to shrink the state and that underlying attitudes on welfare, immigration and Europe are now far more favourable to the Tories than to Labour, and with the inevitable frustration caused by being forced to govern in coalition, and you have the extraordinary spectacle of one of the most rightwing Conservative governments this country has ever seen being continually criticised for not being radical enough from deep within its own ranks.

All this, however, provides little or no comfort for Labour. It may well be that Cameron just can’t win with his own party. But that doesn’t mean that he can’t win his party the next general election.

This article was originally posted at http://www.progressonline.org.uk/2014/02/03/inside-the-tory-mind-2/, where you can read more articles on the same and related themes.

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‘Tim Yeo’s deselection: Is this the start of a Tory Spring?’ Telegraph, 5 February, 2014

Posted on February 9, 2014 by tpbale

The result of the ballot of local members was decisive. After a long and bloody deselection battle with his constituency association, the sitting MP had to admit defeat. Tim Yeo, Suffolk South, February 2014? No. Nigel Nicholson, Bournemouth East, 45 years ago in February 1959.

Just over five years before Nicholson got the chop, the Conservative Party had decided to count its membership. The total was 2,805,032. Sixty years later, in 2013, the figure was only 134,000. Some will argue that those figures tell you all you need to know about the so‑called “Tory Spring” that has seen two MPs dumped by their local associations in under a week.

What do you expect, the argument runs, when the only people prepared to join the party these days are a bunch of swivel-eyed loons? No wonder that David Cameron has no more control over the grassroots than he does over the green benches. Welcome to the 21st-century Tory party, where deference has disappeared, ideological tests can be set and failed, and where there is no longer any such thing as a safe seat.

Well, maybe. But only up to a point. Truth to tell, relations between the Conservative Party’s members out in the country and those who run things at Central Office/CCHQ have always been more akin to an uneasy truce than a true meeting of minds – particularly when it comes to parliamentary candidates.

Deselection of candidates, even if they are sitting MPs, is, as we have already noted, nothing new. It has just become more formalised and thus more transparent.

Nicholson’s case was, in fact, rather an unusual one. Not because he was got rid of (he was actually one of a handful of Tory MPs rejected by their constituency associations after they came out publicly against their government over Suez in 1956) but because an association that fell out with its MP could normally rely on him to do the decent thing and decide not to stand.

But if the means of getting rid of someone have become more institutionalised, the motives for doing so haven’t changed – at least judging by the charges laid against Tim Yeo and Anne McIntosh (deselected last week by Thirsk and Malton) by those who led the local campaigns against them.

“The most frequent type of complaint against a Member,” reports Stuart Ball in his history of the party between the wars, “was lack of diligence, in either the constituency or the House of Commons.” True, rather less was expected back then: regular attendance at Westminster, reasonable attention paid to what was a much smaller constituency caseload, and the odd visit to open a fête or a garden party was pretty much all that was required – provided the MP in question took care to avoid sexual and financial scandal and, above all, worked hard at maintaining good personal relations with his association chairman and his agent.

Indeed, as long as an MP was careful to keep the locals sweet he could almost guarantee being able to resist any amount of pressure from on high to toe the party line in the House of Commons. This was especially the case when an MP’s views on the issue at hand better reflected those of the grassroots, which normally meant – as it arguably does today – that Right-wing rebels, so long as they didn’t actually endanger the survival of a Conservative or Conservative-led government, were given a much easier ride than their more moderate counterparts.

Contrast the treatment handed out in the Thirties to Tory MPs who objected to greater independence for India with the short shrift given to anyone rejecting the appeasement of fascist dictators in Italy and Germany.

What happened to Nicholson and his colleagues a couple of decades later is all the more fascinating because it reminds us that the ultimate impotence of Tory leaders is nothing new, either. Macmillan and his colleagues, for instance, made it clear that they wanted to avoid any witchhunts against the Suez rebels, yet they were utterly unable to save those witches from their fate if their local associations started to reach for their pitchforks and flaming torches.

Cameron and his colleagues were, if anything, a little braver than their predecessors – or more foolhardy, depending on one’s point of view – in that they actually expressed their support for Yeo in writing. Nicholson and his fellow rebels had no such luck.

It could be, of course, that well-intended interventions from on high make things worse rather than better for whoever is in trouble – particularly if they come from a party leader who, whatever he does or says to disprove it, seems forever destined to be regarded by many rank-and-file Conservatives as not quite “one of us”.

That Cameron continues, despite all his tough talk on welfare, immigration and Europe, to remain essentially suspect in their eyes is testament not just to the damage done by his forcing through gay marriage in government but to the power and permanence of the modernising brand that he decided to go with during his first couple of years in opposition.

First impressions, unfortunately for the Prime Minister, still count for a lot in politics. Had David Davis somehow managed to beat Cameron to the top job in 2005, he could (assuming he had left gay marriage well alone) almost certainly have pursued a less stridently right-wing agenda (assuming, for the sake of argument, that he had wanted to) and retained the affection of the grassroots. Moreover, his background and general demeanour might well have prevented the loss of both Tory voters and Tory members to Ukip. Going up against a grammar-school-boy-made-good would certainly have made it harder for Nigel Farage (son of a stockbroker, privately educated, City trader) to pose as the quintessential man of the people battling on their behalf against an effete, Etonian establishment.

To point to what has happened this week, then, and claim that we are witnessing the early stages of what will eventually turn into a full-blown insurgency by the Tory Taliban/Tea Party (delete as appropriate) is clearly nonsense. Membership of the Conservative Party has never entitled its holders to a say on policy. But what it has long afforded them, and continues to afford the dwindling numbers prepared to pay for the privilege, is the right every few years to pick who they want to represent them, and in so doing indirectly determine the long-term direction of their party.

What has happened in Thirsk and Malton and in South Suffolk may have left the leadership tearing its hair out, but it was ever thus – and, for the sake of democracy and (dare one say it?) the Big Society, that’s probably a very good thing, too.

And yet, and yet. While two swallows don’t make a Tory Spring, it remains possible that what has happened this week, while it might not constitute a trend, may eventually help to trigger one.

Once upon a time, except in truly egregious cases, most vaguely dissatisfied rank-and-file Tories were probably prepared to live with their quietly dutiful (or ostentatiously undutiful) Member of Parliament – as long, that is, as he or she didn’t appear in the tabloids for the wrong reasons and didn’t join Labour in the division lobbies.

Nowadays, however, the social media celebrity of backbench and even European Parliament stars such as Douglas Carswell and Daniel Hannan is effectively encouraging those activists to compare the market. Their counterparts in Thirsk and Malton and in Suffolk South have now shown them that (to borrow a theme tune used at a Conservative Party conference a few years ago) you can get it if you really want.

And by thumbing their noses at David Cameron on an increasingly regular basis at Westminster, Tory MPs have reminded them that there isn’t a damn thing their leader can do about it.

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