‘Foxes at the door – the Tories’ identity crisis’, House Magazine/Politics Home, 9 May 2024.

Posted on June 6, 2024 by tpbale

Every political party likes to believe that it’s somehow special, sui generis, novel. In truth, though, there’s little that’s new under the sun.

Reform UK, for all the excitement surrounding it right now, is no exception to the rule – not just because it’s basically UKIP 3.0/Brexit Party 2.0, but because it’s merely the British representative of the populist radical-right parties that have been shaking up continental Europe for years.

That doesn’t mean Richard Tice and his gang don’t present an imminent threat to the Tories. Indeed,  they could well cost the government dozens of seats at the next election – one reason why the sometimes surreal war of words between them has begun to hot up recently.
But for anyone even casually acquainted with British and European politics over the last couple of decades, Tice – together with the man who many see as the party’s real leader, Nigel Farage – is playing some familiar tunes. 

So, too, are those Conservatives desperately trying to persuade many of their erstwhile supporters not to sing along – largely by playing something not too dissimilar themselves: immigration, Islamism, net-zero, woke, European superstate, crime and corruption. Rinse and repeat.

True, there are always variations on the theme. With William Hague it was “a foreign land” and “save the pound”. With David Cameron it was the “tens of thousands” and “the green crap”. With Theresa May it was ”Go home or face arrest” and “citizens of nowhere”.  With Boris Johnson it was “Get Brexit done”.  With Liz Truss it was “the blob”.  And with Rishi Sunak it’s “Stop the boats”.

But insisting that, unlike the liberal left and “the elite”, you’re at last listening to “the people” never works in the longer term. All it does is drive up the salience of those issues that disillusioned voters tempted by parties like Reform care about most. And it legitimises and normalises rhetoric and policy positions that, ultimately, no mainstream centre-right outfit can fully commit to without doing itself and, even more importantly, the country some serious damage.

Portugal’s Chega may have been grabbing all the headlines recently, but the spectre of radical right-wing populism has been haunting Europe for a quarter of a century; 1999 being the year Jörg Haider’s Freedom Party of Austria (FPÖ) narrowly beat the centre-right Austrian People’s Party (ÖVP) to second place in Austria’s federal election. Since then, the continent’s Christian democratic, conservative, and market liberal parties have, along with their centre-left opponents, been trying – and failing – to come up with a way to put the populist radical right back in its box.

Initially the hope was either that it could be frozen out by agreeing to treat it as a pariah or that a spell in government would see it fall apart as its promises were exposed as so much hot air. But when those responses failed to do the job, they soon gave way to what is now effectively the default response, namely to stress to voters that the issues the insurgents are raising – especially (but not exclusively) when it comes to immigration and integration – are indeed pressing, while the solutions they are proffering, and the language they are proffering them in, aren’t actually so unreasonable after all. 

Even where it seems to succeed, it’s only a temporary fix. Nicolas Sarkozy’s hardline stances didn’t ultimately save the French centre right from collapsing or from Marine Le Pen. Similarly, tough talk from Mark Rutte may have kept the Dutch People’s Party for Freedom and Democracy in power for longer but ended with Geert Wilders’ Party for Freedom coming first with almost a quarter of the vote last November. The FPÖ looks likely to do the same in Austria later this year, notwithstanding the ÖVP’s marked swing to the right under Sebastian Kurz. And while Boris Johnson saved the Tories, and Britain, from the Brexit Party in 2019, its successor is surging again right now.  

In no small measure that’s because, in order to fight populist fire with populist fire, mainstream right governments end up saying and doing things which their party’s business constituency and more affluent and educated voters find increasingly hard to stomach – either because it harms their economic interests or their socially liberal values, or both.

Meanwhile, hardline voters come to believe that the government’s heart isn’t really in it and vote for “the real deal” anyway – one reason why so many Reform voters say they wouldn’t return to the Conservatives even if they offered a referendum on immigration.

Just like many of their European counterparts, then, Britain’s Tory leaders have found that ramping up the rhetoric and ratcheting up the policies in order to shoot the populist radical right’s fox ends up feeding it. And now, given the call in some parts of the Conservative Party to “unite the right” by absorbing Reform rather than simply plagiarising it, the fox – in the form of Nigel Farage – may even, after the election anyway, be about to enter the henhouse.

A historically successful mainstream centre-right party effectively merging with or being taken over by a populist radical-right rival? That really would, I confess, be truly special, sui generis, novel – and very worrying to boot.

Originally published at https://www.politicshome.com/thehouse/article/foxes-door-tories-identity-crisis

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‘Local election results will be a serious shellacking for Rishi Sunak and the Tories’, Express, 3 March 2024.

Posted on June 6, 2024 by tpbale

If a week is a long time in politics then three years is a lifetime. In the first week of May 2021, Boris Johnson’s Tories won the Hartlepool byelection from Labour with on a swing of 16 percent – an incredible achievement for a party that had been in government for over a decade and one that, we now know, saw Keir Starmer come very close to throwing in the towel as Leader of the Opposition.

In yesterday’s local elections in Hartlepool, however, Labour gained eight seats and the Conservatives lost six – a result that saw Keir Starmer’s party take control of the town’s council and puts it in in pole position to win the parliamentary seat at the general election later this year.

Starmer can also take similar heart from results in places like Redditch, Thurrock, Swindon and Milton Keynes.

True, there will be a few furrowed brows in Labour HQ at the party’s failure to win back Harlow, as well as at the loss of seats to the Greens and independent candidates in some larger towns and cities – presumably as a byproduct of the war in Gaza among left-wing and/or Muslim voters.

But given the size of Labour’s majorities in the parliamentary seats in those places, their disaffection is ultimately unlikely to cost Starmer seats at the general election, although Bristol just might prove a bit of a headache.

A bit of a headache is as nothing to the full-on migraine that the Conservatives are going to be suffering today and all through the weekend. Ignore all the whistling in the dark about low turnouts and ‘not detecting any real enthusiasm for Sir Keir’: the results aren’t just bad for the Tories and Rishi Sunak; they’re truly terrible.

Tory losses in council seats – always likely given how poorly they’re polling nationally and given those seats were last contested at the height of the so-called vaccine bounce that helped Johnson win Hartlepool – seem to be matching pundits’ most pessimistic predictions.

Don’t be surprised, then, if the Tories end up losing 500 councillors – and not just to Labour but also to the Lib Dems. Ed Davey and co. should be able to claim that they’re well-placed to make major inroads into the government’s so called ‘Blue Wall’ in the home counties, as well as in the south west.

As for Reform UK, they didn’t stand many candidates in the locals but are already crowing about their performance in Blackpool South where they ran the Tories incredibly close in the race for second place.

In truth, however, although the party’s 17 percent vote share looks superficially impressive, it’s as nothing to what its predecessor, UKIP, often managed at byelections in its heyday. That doesn’t necessarily mean Reform won’t cost the Conservatives dear at the general election, particularly if Farage becomes its leader. But the idea that Blackpool constitutes a genuine breakthrough – one that should either encourage Tory MPs try to get shot of Sunak or encourage him to move even further to the populist radical right than he’s already doing – is for the birds.

Ben Houchen’s win in Tees Valley will also come as relief to the PM, especially if Andy Street pulls off the same trick in the West Midlands – and all the more so if Susan Hall miraculously snatches London from Sadiq Khan.

Yet anyone looking for an underlying indicator of how much trouble the Tories are really in should also be looking at the results of mayoral contests in York and North Yorks and the East Midlands, which includes a whole bunch of Labour target seats).

Make no mistake, then, the odd shaft of light aside, Sunak has suffered a serious shellacking. At the moment, and probably sensibly, there appears to be little enthusiasm in Conservative ranks to replace him as the party’s leader. Mind you, a weekend – particularly a bank holiday weekend – can sometimes prove a long time in politics too.

Originally published at https://www.express.co.uk/comment/expresscomment/1895373/rishi-sunak-local-election-tories

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‘Like it’s 1997? Major’s lot weren’t so pointless, poisonous or loathed’, Observer, 17 March 2024.

Posted on March 25, 2024 by tpbale

We learned two things about the Conservatives last week. First, that they’re planning to spend so much money at the next election that they can’t afford to return Frank Hester’s tainted millions. Second, that the election won’t be held in May.

I doubt I was alone in breathing a sigh of relief that the Easter holidays weren’t going to be blighted by a campaign. Even so, I couldn’t help but wonder whether it might actually have been better, for all our sakes, had voters been given the chance to put the Tories out of their all-too-obvious misery. Instead, the country will have to put up with another six months or so of fag-end government.

It wouldn’t be the first time, of course. There have been plenty of occasions on which the proverbial swing of the political pendulum has seen us governed by politicians who have served their purpose yet remain doggedly determined to hang on, hoping against hope that something will turn up while their supposed supporters tear them down and tear themselves apart in the process. Whether, though, we’ve seen anything that quite matches the truly chronic combination of torpor and turmoil that we’re witnessing right now is debatable.

That’s because by no means all outgoing administrations since 1945 have been aware that they were about to be booted out. The Labour politicians who lost in 1951 might have been exhausted after serving in government for a decade of war and peace. But with opinion polling still in its infancy, and with their core working-class vote and their faith in socialism still strong, they weren’t simply – or at least so obviously – going through the motions.

Likewise, the Tory politicians who lost in 1964 knew they were in trouble. Harold Macmillan’s failure to secure EEC entry, plus a bitterly contested succession that saw the leadership pass to the aristocratic Alec Douglas-Home, along with a faltering economy, didn’t help. Still, they hadn’t entirely given up the ghost – rightly so since, in the event, the election proved a very close-run thing.

More than that, like their Labour counterparts in 1951, and in stark contrast to the Conservatives today, Douglas-Home and his colleagues, for all that Wilson and his team talked of “13 wasted years”, could point to some solid achievements: a huge housebuilding programme and massively improved standards of living for the masses – and all without doing any appreciable damage to the postwar welfare state.

Nor, unlike today’s Tories, did they have to worry about the parliamentary party turning into an undisciplined, factionalised rabble, focused more on a post-election leadership contest than winning the election in the first place. Back then, loyalty really was the Conservative party’s secret weapon and Douglas-Home, having lost the election, was free to hand over to Ted Heath at a time of his own choosing.

Heath (like Wilson in 1970) was surprised to lose in 1974. So, for all the difficulties both men encountered, neither really ran fag-end governments. That was not, perhaps, so true of Jim Callaghan, who famously bemoaned “a sea-change in politics” – “a shift in what the public wants and what it approves of” that, after 1978/79’s winter of discontent, helped Margaret Thatcher come to power. The same might be said of Gordon Brown’s government in 2010, even if, like Douglas-Home’s, it ran the opposition much closer than anyone imagined.

But the real parallel with Rishi Sunak’s so-called zombie government and parliament is, of course, John Major’s – an administration for which, after Black Wednesday in 1992, everything that possibly could go wrong did go wrong, with any light at the end of the tunnel turning out to be an oncoming train.

Polling by then was no longer in its infancy, and it indicated beyond any reasonable doubt that nemesis was just around the corner, while the days of even residual deference to the leadership among Tory MPs, along with the public’s enthusiasm for “Thatcherism with a human face”, had long since passed. Sleazy, out of ideas, and utterly divided on Europe, its civil service turning its mind to Labour, and many of its own MPs preoccupied with post-election plotting or else unemployment, the government simultaneously limped on and fell apart.

Even so, I don’t recall Major’s fag-end administration being quite so poisonous and pointless, or quite so loathed, as Sunak’s. I guess we’ll just have to wait until autumn to see if the voters agree.

Originally published at https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2024/mar/17/like-its-1997-majors-lot-werent-so-pointless-poisonous-or-loathed

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‘The fading promises of COP28’, QMUL, 26 February 2024.

Posted on March 25, 2024 by tpbale

New Year’s resolutions are, as we all know, exuberant promises too often forgotten by mid-January. Likewise, the tenuous commitments made at COP28 already sound a little flat. And with elections taking place all over the world in 2024, you have to wonder how much they will impact parties’ manifestos this year. 

Let’s hark back to early December when two weeks of COP negotiations wrapped up. If you’re struggling to recall what was agreed, you’re not alone. In negotiations, language is everything and the call for a “transition” away from oil, gas and coal was as good as it got. But let’s be clear – a vague pledge to “transition” is a far cry from an explicit plan to rapidly phase out these climate-destroying fuels. 

The irony – and, many would say, the hypocrisy – of the UAE hosting wasn’t lost on anyone. The Emiratis owe pretty much their entire wealth to fossil fuels and they, along with the other petrostates, fought hard behind the scenes to water down language around their precious oil and gas. 

In fact, fossil fuel producers were arguably the biggest winners, escaping COP28 without any enforceable commitments to wind down production. Smaller at-risk nations received token loss and damage payments – a drop in the (rising) ocean compared to their adaptation needs. 

So where does this leave us? After two weeks of talks, the world remains way off course when it comes to making the emissions cuts science says we need and vague “transition” rhetoric offers little hope of getting there anytime soon. Our climate emergency demands radical action, yet COP28 brought only more incrementalism – not great news, especially when we’ve just learned from the EU’s Copernicus Climate Change Service that between February 2023 to January 2024 the world reached 1.52C of warming, making last year the first year-long breach of the limit set in Paris in 2015. 

Does this mean all hope is lost? The UK boldly claims climate leadership, but lags in domestic efforts, denting its credibility. And while public concern grows, most voters are likely at this year’s general election to prioritise the cost of living and crumbling public services over the climate action they know is necessary, but they fear may hit them too hard in the pocket – one reason why Keir Starmer’s opposition Labour Party seems to have joined Rishi Sunak’s Conservative government in scaling back its green commitments. 

Some of our Queen Mary academics who travelled to COP point out that while political progress disappoints, meaningful commitments are happening in business, law, agriculture and health. On the global political stage, the green agenda is still playing only a relatively minor part, and democracy seems unlikely to award it a starring role any time soon. 

Originally published at https://www.qmul.ac.uk/media/news/2024/hss/opinion-the-fading-promises-of-cop28.html

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‘Reform’s success is not the real story of the by-elections’, Financial Times, 16 February 2024

Posted on February 25, 2024 by tpbale

If some of the more excitable commentary that has accompanied the news from Kingswood and Wellingborough is anything to go by, then the real story of this week’s by-elections is not so much a dreadful defeat for the Conservatives and an encouraging win for Labour, but the performance of the radical rightwing populist party, Reform UK

Until Thursday, the story goes, Richard Tice and his colleagues had flattered to deceive, doing nowhere near as well in real elections, whether parliamentary or local, as they’ve been doing recently in the opinion polls. This time, however, things were different: the FT’s latest poll tracker puts them on 10 per cent nationally — a figure they essentially matched in Kingswood, where their candidate took 10.4 per cent of the vote, and surpassed in Wellingborough, where the party’s co-deputy leader Ben Habib, took exactly 13 per cent.

Cue predictable panic in the Conservative party — some of it real, some of it confected in the sense that the results will be exploited by rightwing Tories who, even if they don’t want Rishi Sunak replaced, want him to move further in their (and Reform’s) direction. That would mean cutting taxes, slowing progress to net zero, and taking an even harder line on immigration.

The chances of any of that persuading enough voters to return to the Conservative fold to secure them a fifth successive term in office are slim — not when the priority for most Brits right now is an end to both the cost of living crunch and the crisis in the country’s health service.

And before they do anything too rash, anxious Tory MPs should also remember that Reform’s performance at these by-elections doesn’t even come close to matching the results achieved by its predecessor, Ukip.

In local contests which preceded the 2015 general election (when it took 12.6 per cent of the vote), the party, then led by Nigel Farage, regularly came second, not third — and it did so on shares of the vote that exceeded 20 per cent. Moreover, it managed to take first place in the two constituencies (Clacton and Rochester and Strood) it fought after two Tory MPs defected to Ukip in the autumn of 2014.

That said, what we saw in Kingswood and Wellingborough is not nothing. If Reform manages to stay in double figures throughout the coming year, then the Conservatives are in even more serious trouble than they appear to be right now. That’s because polling suggests that the bulk of those switching from the party to Reform voted Tory back in 2019. Were Tice to follow through on his promise to stand candidates in Conservative, as well as opposition-held seats, then this could, in a swath of more marginal constituencies, easily see tens of Tory candidates lose out to their Labour and Liberal Democrat rivals.

Moreover, Reform has achieved its current level of support with the relatively unknown Richard Tice in charge. Heaven knows what sort of figures it might register were Nigel Farage to decide to return to the fray and lead a party of which he (it being a registered company rather than a more conventional membership organisation) is the majority shareholder.

Rishi Sunak must be hoping that the lure of the big bucks that Farage, as a friend of Donald Trump, could earn as a talking head in the US presidential campaign will ensure that eventuality doesn’t come to pass. He should also be crossing his fingers that none of the Conservatives’ current contingent in Westminster jumps ship to join Reform, especially if a defector has the courage to resign their seat to fight a by-election.

But, in the midst of all this speculation, let’s not lose sight of the bigger story from both Kingswood and Wellingborough — namely that they bear out the results of opinion poll after opinion poll in suggesting that voters are fed up with the Tories and now seem prepared to give Keir Starmer and Labour the benefit of the doubt.

Originally published at https://www.ft.com/content/6ba497d4-f64b-4bcc-8646-b77c4cce8135

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‘Tories’ worst nightmare is coming true as Reform threat proves real’, Daily Express, 16 February 2024

Posted on February 25, 2024 by tpbale

Both the Prime Minister and his opposite number have had a torrid time of it over the last week. Things began particularly badly for Starmer, when anti-Semitic remarks made by Labour’s candidate in Rochdale, Azhar Ali, came to light. They only got worse when, instead of withdrawing support from him straight away, Starmer tried to style it out, only to have to ditch him anyway the next day.

True, the damage done to Labour’s chances of winning the general election is unlikely to be fatal.

But the Rochdale shame and shambles still aren’t helpful – not least because a key component of Starmer’s schtick is that he’s fundamentally changed his party and that, while he may not be particularly inspiring, he is at least decisive and competent.

Rochdale also played right into the hands of Tory spinners who spend most of their time these days coming up with new ways to present ‘Sir Keir’, as they insist on calling him (presumably to suggest he’s some sort of out-of-touch aristocrat), as a ‘flip-flopper.’

Along with the fact that a widely predicted increase in inflation failed to transpire, this took some of the pressure off Sunak, who’d spent the previous week shrugging off criticism of his £1,000 Rwanda bet and his trans jibe at PMQs.

But the respite for Rishi didn’t last.

The PM has made growth one of the five pledges he robotically repeats in every single media appearance, which is why Thursday’s announcement of a recession represents a really bad blow for him.

That recession may be dismissed as merely ‘technical’ by his Chancellor but, sadly for Sunak, it accords with all too many people’s lived experiences.

‘It’s the economy, stupid’ may be a cliché that originated across the pond; but anyone who thinks, as a fair few Tory MPs seem to think, that voters can be persuaded to forget all about it by banging on about woke and small boats, needs their head examining.

In Britain, it’s also the NHS, stupid, so stories about the difficulties faced by the NHS right now are hitting the Tories hard too – this week’s news that there’s been a big drop in applications for nursing degrees is just the latest example.

In the end, it’s these fundamentals – not which more or less dodgy candidate stands (or isn’t allowed to stand) for this or that party – that decide which of them wins or loses, whether we’re talking about general elections or by-elections.

Personally, I doubt that things are quite as bad for the Tories as this week’s MRP poll, which has them losing a jaw-dropping 285 seats, suggests.

But the results from both Wellingborough and Kingswood are nevertheless stunning – all the more so, perhaps, because Reform now seems to be performing in line with its opinion poll ratings.

So a tough week has ended far better for Starmer than it has for Sunak. Even if he rides out the inevitable calls for him to go by some on his own side this weekend, the Prime Minister is still in a whole heap of trouble.

Originally published at https://www.express.co.uk/comment/expresscomment/1867329/Tories-Reform-by-election-result-Kingswood-Wellingborough

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‘The plotters, the coup and Farage’s path to the Tory throne’, Daily Telegraph, 27 January 2024.

Posted on February 1, 2024 by tpbale

Tory nerves have been fraying for months. But with the publication of a survey predicting the loss of nearly 200 seats, funded (apparently to the tune of £40,000) by the so-far-so-mysterious “Conservative Britain Alliance”, there’s a serious risk of full-blown panic setting in.

The constituency-by-constituency survey means Conservative MPs are now split into those sighing with relief that, despite it all, they still look like holding onto their seats and those who know they have little hope of doing so – one of whom, Simon Clarke, took to the pages of this newspaper to join the similarly-doomed Andrea Jenkyns, in calling on his colleagues to rid themselves of Rishi Sunak before it was too late.

For some of us, the only surprising thing about Clarke’s cri du cœur and Lord David Frost’s equally apocalyptic take on the survey’s results was the absence of any mention of the so-called “wipeout” suffered by Canada’s Progressive Conservatives back in 1993.

How Conservative parties die

That was the year in which Canada’s governing party, also led by a recently appointed party leader and prime minister, Kim Campbell, lost 167 seats, retaining only two it had previously held in Canada’s 295-seat House of Commons. 

The explanations for what can genuinely be called an “extinction-level event”, were, as they always are, complex and contingent – but by no means completely unfamiliar to us here.

As with Scotland, there were tensions over constitutional reforms designed to pacify separatists in the French-speaking province of Quebec, not only leading to a loss of constituencies there but also inflaming resentment elsewhere – resentment that led to the formation of a challenger party on the right which, after winning precisely no seats in 1988, picked up 52 five years later. Its name? Reform.

And then there was the economy. Canada was only just emerging from a recession and the government, with public finances under severe stress as a result, had introduced a deeply unpopular Goods and Services Tax (GST). Having been in office for nine years, there was no one else to blame, and with the end of its latest five-year term looming, the Progressive Conservatives had effectively run out of road.

That said, when the contest kicked off in the first week of September, it could not have been predicted quite how badly things would turn out. Seven weeks later, when the ballots were counted, the Progressive Conservatives took just 16 per cent to the Liberal Party’s 41.  

Almost as damagingly, Reform took 19 per cent, while the Bloc Québécois took 13.5 per cent, rising from 10 to 54 seats, with both parties hoovering up plenty of former Conservative voters.  

Campbell, having lost her own seat in the rout, surrendered the leadership to former Cabinet Minister Jean Charest, whom she’d beaten in the contest to replace Brian Mulroney earlier in the year and who was one of the two Progressive Conservatives left in the Commons. 

But it was never really glad confident morning again, and in 2003 the party merged with the successor to Reform, the Canadian Alliance, to create the Conservative Party of Canada, whose leader Stephen Harper, by “uniting the right”, managed to serve as Canada’s prime minister from 2006-2015. Polls, which currently put the party near 40 per cent, suggest it won’t be long before it returns to office.

Canada 1993, Britain 2024?

The 1993 catastrophe – easily the worst single defeat ever suffered by an incumbent government in a Western democracy – has achieved near-mythical status among policy wonks around the world, especially among right-wing politicians keen to avoid the same fate.

True, it might not have earned a mention this week by Messrs Clarke and Frost, but it certainly hasn’t been forgotten by senior figures in Reform UK. Speaking just a few days before Christmas about the party’s determination to remove the Tories from power, one of the insurgent party’s number predicted that, if and when Nigel Farage was “properly engaged” with Reform, its ratings would shoot up overnight. “You do that to the Tories,” they declared, “and you are looking at a Canadian wipeout.”

The parallels, of course, may not be exact, but they can be portrayed as eerie – especially by those determined to see them as such.

After all, Sunak, like Campbell, gave his party something of a boost in the polls straight after taking over from a deeply unpopular predecessor, only to see it evaporate in short order as voters rapidly remembered that all the problems associated with the old regime – not least when it came to the economy – hadn’t magically disappeared.

Then there’s the fact that Reform helped the opposition into power by splitting the right-wing vote. In 1993, Canada’s Liberals increased their vote share by only nine points. But in doing so they more than doubled their number of seats and won a comfortable overall majority (their best performance since the 1940s). That is what haunts so many of today’s Tories on this side of the Atlantic, whichever wing of the party they see themselves belonging to.

And they are right to worry. Reform UK might not yet have ascended to the giddy heights reached by the Brexit Party in the summer of 2019; but it seems to be doing better and better with each poll published and now looks set to stay in double figures, with most of its new supporters moving to it from the Conservatives rather than from Labour’s traditionalist flank. 

Why hasn’t Farage joined Reform?

That was true of voters defecting to the Brexit Party five years ago, too; but back then disaster was averted by Tory MPs, reluctantly or otherwise, replacing Theresa May with Boris Johnson – who, in terms of his ability to connect with disaffected Leave voters, proved more than a match for Farage. 

Sunak stands no chance of doing the same. As Farage noted this week: “Rishi Sunak may be intellectually bright, but he does not connect with ordinary people at all.” Nor, as even some of those who despair of Sunak acknowledge, is there anyone else, either inside or outside the Cabinet, who seems likely to do so either; or at least no one among the ranks of those crazy enough to preside over a general election currently set to deliver something between defeat and annihilation.

Johnson was helped, of course, in 2019 by Farage’s last-minute decision not to stand candidates against sitting Conservative MPs. That was not so much because it saved many of them their seats (research suggests, in fact, that only a handful, if that, of Tory incumbents held on as a result) but because it sent a signal to “his voters” that they could vote for Johnson and trust him to “Get Brexit Done”.

All of which prompts an intriguing question: given that, as was the case at the beginning of 2019, we have a hopelessly divided, poorly-led Conservative government that looks to be heading straight for the rocks, why hasn’t Farage decided to return to the fray to lead Reform UK?

Ask around and you’ll hear various explanations. According to his stand-in, the party’s current leader Richard Tice, Farage is “giving a lot of thought to the extent of the role that he wants to play in helping Reform UK save Britain”. Don’t forget, he told journalists: “A good poker player doesn’t show their hand too early. Nigel is the master of political timing.”

But there’s another explanation. Tice may think that, as he put it recently, “the Tory party deserve to be smashed and destroyed”. But Farage may prefer to wound rather than to kill – for the simple reason that one day soon he’s hoping not just to rejoin the Conservatives, but to lead them.  

Nigel Farage, New Conservative leader? 

It’s a prospect that he himself raised back in October, telling a journalist, “I’d be very surprised if I were not Conservative leader by 2026. Very surprised” – only to say not long afterwards that he’d made the remark “in jest”. But it seems eminently possible that the enthusiasm with which he’d been greeted by the Tory faithful at the Conservative Party conference in Manchester in October may have given him pause for thought. 

Sunak, clearly desperate to keep Farage fans from flocking to Reform UK at the general election, told GBNews that “the Tory Party is a broad church. I welcome lots of people who want to subscribe to our ideals, to our values’ – a statement that only served to suggest that the door remains, if not wide open, then at the very least ajar.

That allows nervy Conservatives to indulge the fantasy of Farage loyally joining the Tory fold before the general election and transforming their fortunes – just think of the political coup de théâtre we’d witness were Sunak to allow the prodigal son, in the run up to the campaign, to seek and win selection in a safe Tory seat! 

According to that fantasy, getting Farage inside the Tory tent would represent the most effective way of fulfilling Tory strategist Isaac Levido’s “narrow path to victory”. Should the economy improve and tax cuts deliver a feel-good factor, the polls might tighten sufficiently to allow the government to argue that a ballot cast for Reform UK would let in Labour rather than being “a free hit” for disaffected Tory voters who assume their party is going to lose anyway.

In reality, a pre-election Farage-Tory alliance – or at least a non-aggression pact – would benefit the former Ukip leader far more than it would the embattled Prime Minister, especially in the aftermath of an election that looks likely to leave the Tories in what Lord Frost vividly described as “smoking rubble”. At that point, Farage really would be well placed to rejoin the party, make it into the Commons and eventually run for the leadership. 

In many ways, it would make perfect sense. Farage taking over would, after all, represent the culmination of a process that has arguably been unfolding for a decade – namely the sometimes halting but seemingly inexorable transformation of the Conservatives from a mainstream centre-right outfit, concerned mainly with the protection and promotion of the free-market and traditional institutions, into a populist party of the right – dedicated to disrupting, even destroying, institutions the better to pursue its twin obsessions with immigration and “woke”. 

There are many on the right of the party who firmly believe that this is the direction in which it must travel if it is to thrive in the future, convinced as they are that their big win in 2019 reflected a long-term (and for some, long-awaited) realignment of British politics triggered by Brexit. They realise, however, that journey can only be taken under the leadership of a politician possessed of sufficient guile and charisma to enable them to sell a small-state, low-spend, low-tax message to less affluent voters who, for all their cultural conservatism, are not necessarily attracted, especially if they are heavily reliant on public services, to Thatcherite economics. 

For a while, of course, those right-wingers had high hopes of Boris Johnson in that regard – so much so that some one hundred MPs felt able to countenance his returning to lead the party in the wake of the implosion of (the self-evidently guileless and charisma-free) Liz Truss. But now that they’ve finally grasped, post Partygate, that even many of their target voters never want Johnson near No 10 ever again, their erstwhile champion is no longer an option.

Nor, after her tragicomic departure from Cabinet, they have concluded, is Suella Braverman. And nor, if charisma is one of the crucial qualities you’re looking for in a leader, is Robert Jenrick. Kemi Badenoch might just fit the bill, but, even leaving aside what some colleagues see as her arrogance and abrasiveness, will she really connect as well with ordinary voters as she apparently does with the Tory grassroots?

Farage on the other hand has proven star quality – and guile and charisma by the bucket-load. He may not be a Conservative yet, but the latest Ipsos polling suggests that getting on for half of all those who voted for the party in 2019 have a favourable impression of him – around the same, note, who look favourably upon Sunak and Johnson, two paid-up Tories. 

As long as he doesn’t decide to join Tice in genuinely trying to smash and destroy the Conservative Party, why shouldn’t there be a way back for him, perhaps after Badenoch is given a chance to try (and probably fail) to restore its fortunes after what many assume will be, to quote Clarke, “a shattering defeat”?

Having resolutely refused to say who funded the YouGov poll that he used to put the cat among the pigeons, Lord Frost, confronted mid-week by the Conservatives’ leader in the lords, Lord Nicholas True, is reported to have told him that he “did not think the donors were linked to Reform”. But that was a form of words that hardly rules out the possibility that the “shadowy” group based out of an office in Covent Garden, working (supposedly in cahoots with 10 or so disillusioned Tory right-wingers) to oust Sunak may have links (financial and otherwise) to the Faragist insurgency.

A possible plot?

One prime mover in this supposed coup has been outed as Will Dry, a 26 year-old former No 10 special adviser, where he was head of polling, who allegedly framed the questions for the devastating Conservative Britain Alliance poll earlier this week. Dry said he had become “steadily more dispirited” working in the heart of government, and “had concluded, sorrowfully, that the Conservatives are heading for the most almighty of defeats”. If Farage returned to frontline politics, suggests Dry, “the Conservative Party essentially won’t exist by Christmas”.

But the Westminster rumour mill is now connecting other names to the supposed plot. These include Jake Ryan, a former journalist who was appointed a special adviser to Braverman in October 2022, when Joel Winton also joined her team. Winton and Ryan are not the only Braverman alumni supposedly connected to the new coup. Plotters are also thought to include Chris Jenkins, a former adviser to Lord Frost, who joined Truss’ team in No 10 after also working for a couple of years as special adviser to… Braverman.

They envisage a torrid couple of months ahead for the Prime Minister that could help their cause prosper, in which the Tories lose two by-elections next month and are then assailed by local election results in May that are devastating generally, but particularly in Red Wall seats. Farage seems to sniff opportunity here. As he tweeted this week: “The Red Wall is completely and utterly gone.”

Yet a successful challenge to Sunak from the right of his party, by Braverman, or former immigration minister Jenrick, or anyone else before the election, remains highly unlikely. 

Which brings us, full circle, back to the Canadian wipeout scenario. The sheer suddenness and scale of the defeat is what most of us who remember it, rightly, recall. But just as important is what followed in its wake – namely, the merger of the losers with their nemesis to form a new, more populist, more right-wing, and electorally successful Conservative Party. 

Couldn’t happen here?  Don’t be so sure. “The [current] Tory party seem to be utterly terrified of me,” Farage noted earlier this week. No wonder.

Originally published at https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2024/01/27/tory-party-rishi-sunak-nigel-farage-coup/

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‘Europe is marching to the right. Can Keir Starmer carry the centre-left torch?’, Observer, 14 January 2024.

Posted on February 1, 2024 by tpbale

If Keir Starmer’s Labour party wins power this year, it will be bucking a trend. In many European countries, it’s not the centre left but the right – and all too often the far right – that seems to be on a roll.

In France, Marine Le Pen’s Rassemblement National is leading in the polls. In the Netherlands, Geert Wilders’ equally extreme Freedom party (PVV) scooped nearly a quarter of the vote at last November’s general election and has increased its support as coalition negotiations drag on.

In Italy, Giorgia Meloni, leader of the supposedly “post-fascist” Fratelli d’Italia (Brothers of Italy), is already running the country. And, although Rishi Sunak’s new best friend is playing nice with foreign leaders, at home she’s attempting to make yet another change to the country’s electoral system. If she gets her way, not only will Italy get a directly elected prime minister but whichever party emerges as the largest at the next election (as Fratelli did in 2022 with just 26%) will win a majority of parliamentary seats irrespective of its vote share.

The situation in Germany is not much rosier. In 2021, the Social Democrats (SPD), led by the defiantly uncharismatic centrist, Olaf Scholz, won a narrow victory, enabling them to form a “traffic light” coalition with the Free Democrats and the Greens.

Sadly, things have gone downhill ever since. With the country mired in a so-called winter of discontent, the SPD is now polling at just 15%, down 10 points on its 2021 showing, putting it in third place behind not only the Christian Democratic CDU/CSU (on 32%) but also the worryingly extreme Alternative for Germany (AfD), which now has the support of over one in five Germans.

A “black-blue” (CDU/CSU and AfD) coalition after 2025’s general election remains unlikely but it can’t be ruled out. Indeed, talking up the possibility may actually be the SPD’s only hope of a last-gasp recovery.

After all, framing last year’s election in Spain as “a showdown between the forces of progress and the forces of reactionary conservatism” represented by a putative government of the centre-right Partido Popular and the far-right Vox saw the socialist prime minister, Pedro Sánchez, of the Spanish Socialist Workers’ party (PSOE), snatch victory from the jaws of defeat. Whether his subsequent decision to cling on to office via a controversial deal with Catalan separatists is such a wise move, however, remains to be seen.

Sánchez’s dramatic escape and Vox’s disappointing performance serve as a useful caveat to anyone overly inclined to see the far right triumphing and the centre left losing everywhere they look. So, too, at least for the moment, do Denmark and Norway. That said, it is impossible to deny that the 21st century has seen the far right thrive and the centre left descend into long-term decline throughout western Europe.

The reasons are myriad and complex, and they vary between countries. We do need, though, to avoid falling into the trap of assuming that, simply because populist radical right parties have increased their support at the same time as social democratic parties have lost theirs, the change is due to working-class voters moving en masse from one to the other.

Indeed, the latest research suggests that this is far from the case, with most of those flocking to the far right coming either from more mainstream rightwing parties or from the ranks of the serially disillusioned. Meanwhile, many of those fleeing the centre left are going either to the Greens and the radical left or (and this should never be underestimated) switching to the centre right rather than the far right.

In fact, the loss of traditional working-class voters experienced by Europe’s centre left is mainly due to the disappearance of many of the industrial, often heavily unionised, jobs that they used to do, and the concomitant rise in more diverse, fragmented and, frankly, more middle-class, service-sector employment.

Yet there’s an extent to which centre-left parties only have themselves to blame. And that includes Labour, even if, so far, it has got off relatively lightly compared with its continental counterparts – thanks mainly to first-past-the-post discouraging Britain’s progressive voters from supposedly “wasting” their vote on more radical alternatives.

By insisting for years that we should all embrace (or at least learn to live with) a more marketised, less welfarist economy, the centre left has sacrificed its ability to offer voters the safety net against insecurity that many, not unreasonably, still crave.

At the same time, with politics becoming an overwhelmingly graduate profession, centre-left politicians look and sound less and less like the people they claim to represent.

All this has played (and continues to play) into the hands of charismatic political entrepreneurs on the populist radical right who draw a rhetorically powerful distinction between an apparently out-of-touch establishment elite and “the people” they’ve arguably let down and ignored.

It’s a distinction that populist politicians have found particularly easy to dramatise, too, as their more mainstream counterparts, in their desperation to prove they are “listening to voters”, have consistently overpromised and underdelivered – most obviously on controlling immigration.

Those same mainstream politicians – on the centre left as well as the centre right – have also done the far right a favour by adopting many of its populist tropes and hardline policies. Rather than stealing their thunder, that strategy has served only to make them look to more and more voters like an increasingly viable and legitimate option.

Starmer, then, may be bucking the trend if he makes it into No 10. But, once he gets there, he also needs be careful. By overdoing the fiscal orthodoxy and the tough talk on migration, he could easily end up reinforcing Europe’s big shift to the right instead of becoming a beacon of hope for the continent’s battered progressives. Sometimes it’s good to be the odd one out.

Originally published at https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/jan/14/europe-marches-right-keir-starmer-carry-centre-left-torch

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‘The Conservative Party’, UK in a Changing Europe, 5 December 2023.

Posted on February 1, 2024 by tpbale

British voters have fallen out of love with the Conservative Party – and hopes that Rishi Sunak might persuade them otherwise are fading fast. On almost any measure, the Conservatives have fallen behind Labour. And while the Leader of the Opposition, Keir Starmer, may not be that popular, he is generally seen as a better bet than Sunak. According to Savanta, back in November 2022 some 38% of the public believed that Sunak would make the better prime minister, compared to 35% who said the same about Starmer. A year later Sunak’s score had dropped by six points to 32%, while Starmer’s had risen by the same amount to 41%.

The last general election delivered a comfortable 11.5point win for the Conservatives, giving Boris Johnson a substantial Commons majority. Now, however, average headline voting intention figures put Labour ahead by between 15 and 20 percentage points. Yet it wasn’t immediately downhill from that election. Indeed, the Conservatives widened their lead in the early weeks of the pandemic in 2020, only to see it shrink to virtually zero in the chaos that followed and then bounce back to around ten points with the vaccine roll-out in the New Year of 2021.

By the late autumn of 2021, however, Labour had drawn level, and the Conservatives have been in trouble ever since. The Partygate revelations and atmosphere of crisis around Number Ten were bad enough. But the premiership of Liz Truss proved even more disastrous, widening what had been a Labour lead of around 10% to an incredible 30 points in a few short weeks.

True, Truss’ replacement by Sunak saw a recovery from the nadir, with the gap between the parties halving in the spring of 2023 to some 15 points. However, since then, any recovery has stalled, with Politico’s latest poll of polls putting Labour on 46% and the Conservatives on 26%.

This should come as no surprise in view of the economic difficulties facing the country and the state of public services, particularly the NHS. It also chimes with Sunak’s own poll ratings. He became PM on 25 October 2022 with an average net prime ministerial approval rating of +4, which briefly rose to +8. Since then, however, his ratings have declined, and since January 2023 have essentially flatlined for months, with approval running at under 40 % and disapproval over 60%.

Even this may flatter to deceive. On a different measure – namely when voters are asked whether they have a favourable or unfavourable view of a politician or a party – Sunak’s rating fell to a new low of minus 41% at the end of August 2023, even though the Conservatives ‘recovered’ slightly to -48. A mere 8% said they had a favourable view of Sunak but an unfavourable view of the Conservatives – not many more than the 5% who said the opposite – suggesting Sunak is no longer much of an asset. Some 60% of those asked had an unfavourable view of both leader and party. This compares with the 45% who said the same of Starmer’s Labour.

While Labour’s rating is hardly stellar, it can take some comfort not only from Conservative scores but also from some polling which suggests that voters see Starmer and Labour as ideologically closer to them than Sunak and the Conservatives. Asked to place themselves on a left-right scale running from zero to ten, the (mean) average self-placement was 4.6, with Starmer placed at 3.9 and Labour at 3.3. However, voters placed the Conservatives further away at 7.6 and Sunak at 7.3.

The Conservatives have also fallen behind Labour when it comes to handling the issues voters name as priorities – most worryingly, on handling the economy, where, according to YouGov polling over the summer, only one in five people thought they were the best party compared to one in four who named Labour. Eight out of ten voters thought the government was handling the economy badly.

The same was true of the NHS, where the Conservatives trailed Labour by 12 points to 40 as best party, and of immigration – long seen by Conservative MPs as one of their electoral trump cards – where the party trailed Labour by 17 to 22 points. Indeed, practically the only good news for the Conservatives was that they continued to outperform Labour as the best party to handle Brexit. Yet even there the gap between the two parties was a mere four points, and with two-thirds of voters saying the government was handling that issue badly.

It will come as no surprise if numbers like these provoke further disquiet in Conservative ranks over the coming months. Such division itself, however, risks doing further damage – some 66 % of voters were telling YouGov in mid-August 2023 that they thought the Conservatives were divided, compared to just 35% who thought the same of Labour.

Whether or not ‘divided parties lose elections’, it is almost certainly the case that governments that look exhausted and no longer in control of events are in severe danger. Unfortunately for the Conservatives, voters seem to have made up their minds: 84% of voters told YouGov in mid-August that they thought the government looked ‘tired’ and 88% reckoned it was led by, rather than leading, events.

By the beginning of September 75% of people told pollsters More in Common that it was time for a change of government – a figure that included a striking 47% of those who voted Conservative in 2019. Two devastating by-election losses to Labour towards the end of October suggested such polls painted an accurate picture of public opinion.

As the general election draws nearer, then, there may be little Sunak and his colleagues can do other than to focus on his five priorities and hope that something will turn up. Stranger things have happened, of course – but not as often as he would like.

Originally published at https://ukandeu.ac.uk/wp-content/uploads/2023/12/UKICE-The-State-of-Public-Opinion-2023-2-.pdf

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‘The Tories have changed direction – but they may not be headed where you think’, Daily Telegraph, 18 November 2023.

Posted on February 1, 2024 by tpbale

With only a year or less to go before a general election, one would have thought the Conservative Party’s historic will to power would by now have begun to reassert itself, ensuring that its members set aside their differences in order to take the fight to Labour. 

No such luck. Rather than subsiding, what’s now routinely described as “the Tory civil war” seems to have entered a new, even more vicious phase. The Prime Minister’s decision to sack Suella Braverman and bring back David Cameron has been widely interpreted as Rishi Sunak finally deciding to align himself and his party with the supposedly “moderate” centre-Right. Frozen out, in this take, is the populist radical Right personified by the now former home secretary and another ex-PM, Red Wall-winning Boris Johnson. The inevitable conclusion is that the two camps are now set for a tooth-and-nail fight to the death. 

But is the reality as simple as that?

The ‘zealots’

No sooner had news of the reshuffle emerged than supporters of “Suella” – who like Johnson now goes by her first name in politics – were rushing to declare their dismay. Writing for The Telegraph, Miriam Cates and Danny Kruger, founders of the New Conservatives – a collection of 20 or so MPs who mostly represent seats in the North and the Midlands – claimed that, “instead of returning us to the promises of 2019, this reshuffle looks more like an attempt to reconvene the class of 2015”.

Theirs is only the latest of a long line of Tory backbench ginger groups inspired by the success of the European Research Group, which stiffened the Government’s stance on Brexit. The aims of this latest ‘party within a party’, are threefold: It aims to “support legislation that delivers on the priorities of the people”; “to develop ideas for the 2024 Conservative Party Manifesto”; and to “campaign and raise funds for New Conservative candidates in marginal seats”. The fact that the New Conservatives have John Hayes as their honorary president is also significant. In both policy and personnel there is considerable overlap with Hayes’ very own Common Sense Group, which has been around since the summer of 2020 and operates in essentially the same ideological space.

Its 2021, occasionally hyperbolic collection of essays, Common Sense: Conservative Thinking for a Post-Liberal Age, sets out clearly what that space is: “‘Common sense’ is deemed to be the preserve of ‘the people’ and/or ‘ordinary people’ – the ‘mainstream majority’ at permanent risk of betrayal by an overly-progressive, insufficiently patriotic ‘elite’, which sneers and sniggers at their salt-of-the-earth attitudes to everything from what’s on the telly to the British empire, sex education in schools, ‘cancel culture’ in universities, and – above all – curbing immigration.”

Indeed, the latter – along with a (presumably related) concern about British women being discouraged from having all the children that they would ideally like and that the country badly needs – is something of an obsession for the Cates and Kruger group. A raft of recommendations on how to reduce the numbers coming to the UK from abroad was the subject of the New Conservatives’ first-ever report, produced in July. So it is hardly surprising that its members have been all over the media this week, urging Sunak to show the Supreme Court who’s boss.

One of them (the man he appointed Deputy Party Chairman, Lee Anderson) argued that the court’s judgment on the Rwanda plan was “a dark day for British people”: asylum-seekers, he claimed, were “intruders” and “we should ignore the law and send them back the same day.”

Its movers and shakers were just as put out by Monday’s reshuffle as they were by the Rwanda decision on Wednesday. To them the Cabinet changes signalled, as Kruger and Cates put it in an open letter published on Tuesday, “a major change in the policy direction of the Government” to the extent that “the Conservative Party now looks like it is deliberately walking away from the coalition of voters who brought us into power with a large majority in 2019” – an election which, in their words, “represented the realignment of our politics”.

Whether this “realignment” was a permanent watershed, or a more contingent, never-to-be-repeated confluence of Brexit, Boris and Corbyn, is now at the heart of the Tory in-fighting. Tory opponents of the New Conservatives point to mounting polling evidence suggesting the latter, and hint darkly that talk of realignment is actually just self-interest on the part of new Red Wall Conservative MPs, who were swept into Parliament by the unique circumstances of 2019, and who now fear being swept out of it again in 2024. Understanding which side of the “realignment” Conservative MPs are on is crucial to understanding the divide within the Party now being painted as between ‘soft’ and ‘hard’ Right; between ‘moderate’ and ‘zealot’.

The ‘moderates’

Conservatives who see themselves as not only more moderate but more realistic – the centre-Right, if you like – may have appreciated the way that Johnson pulled the party out of the nosedive it was in during the last days of Theresa May. They may also have admired the way that Johnson crushed Corbyn and, every bit as importantly, brushed aside Nigel Farage by building upon the culturally conservative coalition that May (for all the good it did her) managed to forge between affluent voters in the party’s southern heartlands and somewhat less affluent (but hardly destitute) voters in the more or less post-industrial North and Midlands.

However, they (and here at least, “they” includes Boris Johnson himself) never ran away with the idea, unlike their “faith, flag and family” colleagues, that this was somehow forever. 

Obviously, the centre-Right hoped, along with Johnson, that the party might be able to hold 2019’s winning coalition together for another election or two. Hence a combination of targeted regional and infrastructure spending (“levelling up”); some much-trumpeted bungs to the NHS (40 “new” hospitals and tens of thousands of “new” nurses); and a promise to reverse May’s police cuts. Hence, too, a limited, largely rhetorical, “war on woke”, along with a tough line on “illegal” asylum-seekers to distract from the embarrassingly liberal post-Brexit immigration regime necessitated by the UK labour market’s chronic skills shortages.

But, ultimately, as far as the centre-Right was concerned anyway, this was still an essentially Conservative government. None of the above (nor, indeed, the irritating but sadly necessary transition to net zero) should be allowed to cost the Government and its taxpayers too much money, nor do anything to reduce UK capital’s access to world markets and vice versa.

For centre-Right Tories, after all, Brexit (which most had cautioned and voted against in 2016) was risk enough. Fingers crossed it might work out well enough in the end, even if, in their view, there was little hope of pushing through the deregulation and welfare-state slashing that some of their more neo-liberal colleagues were advocating. 

As for colleagues arguing the opposite, namely that the referendum result represented a mandate and an opportunity to return to a quasi-mercantilist, even protectionist regime, they were barking – and not just up the wrong tree.

But does the reshuffle mean that the centre-Right has at last put those colleagues back in their respective boxes and that Sunak has finally outed himself as one of them all along? And does it represent not only the return of Cameron but of the Cameroons?

Back to the future?

Apparently – and unsurprisingly given how much he relied on him when he was prime minister – Cameron (who was apparently recommended for the job by his own former foreign secretary, William Hague) is still pretty thick with his former chancellor, George Osborne. Meanwhile, the latter’s one-time chief of staff (and now prospective parliamentary candidate) Rupert Harrison is on the Economic Advisory Council appointed by Jeremy Hunt, two-time secretary of state under Cameron. Moreover Danny Finkelstein, Conservative peer and author of the appositely-titled Everything in Moderation and a must-read piece in David Gauke’s recently published essay collection The Case for the Centre Right, is said to be helping Sunak prep for PMQs, as well as, along with Hague, offering him sage advice in his weekly newspaper column.

Meanwhile, front of house, there’s the trio of former Cameron-era Number 10 and CCHQ staffers – Deputy PM and Cabinet Office Minister Oliver Dowden; Laura Trott, just promoted to Chief Secretary of the Treasury; and Richard Holden, Sunak’s new Party Chairman. And then there are those, like the media-friendly scions of Conservative families, Victoria Atkins (now doing Hunt’s old job at Health and Social Care) and Laura Farris (given her first junior ministerial role in the reshuffle), who, like Energy Secretary Claire Coutinho, would surely have fitted in perfectly had they been in SW1 a decade ago.

But does one Cameron, and a handful of Cameroons, a centre-Right Tory government, let alone a centre-Right Tory Party, make? Have they really taken back control? Are they suddenly the future once again? And if there is such a thing as “the soul” of the Conservative Party, will they emerge victorious in a battle for it with the New Conservatives, or indeed with the “Trussites” of the Conservative Growth Group who are also itching to get into the fight?

The answer to all these questions is a resounding no.

The return of cakeism

The most obvious reason why not is that Sunak is clearly as determined as his predecessors (and especially, of course, Johnson) to have his cake and eat it. Yes, he’s hoping to project the supposedly moderate (but in reality broadly Thatcherite) managerial competence trumpeted (not always with good reason) by the centre-Right. But at the same time he’s keen to remind “the people” that he’s on their side when it comes to resisting the attempts of “foreign courts” to prevent him stopping the boats, to beating back “woke” and (to coin a phrase), to getting rid of at least some of the more immediately costly “green crap” (copyright D Cameron) associated with the transition to net zero.

That, after all, was what motivated some of the culture-war clichés Sunak spouted during his (failed) first leadership bid. It was what motivated his surprise appointment of another Cameron-era (albeit non-Cameroon) blast-from-the-past politician, Esther McVey (founder of the self-appointed Blue Collar Conservatives and sometime GBNews co-host), as his so-called “Minister for Common Sense”. It was what motivated his press conference promise on Wednesday to do whatever it takes to get planes taking off to Rwanda. And it was what motivated him not to sack Anderson for suggesting that those planes should leave that same day, arguing instead that “Lee’s comments reflect the strength of feeling on this issue”.

The other reason why the Cameroons – “the establishment”, “the patricians”, the “Blue-Wallers”, whatever you want to call them – won’t permanently win the day is also the reason why the Red Wall’s “send-them-backers” and Truss’s “Singapore on Thames” tendency won’t win it either.

The UK’s first past the post electoral system practically guarantees that our two main parties are essentially coalitions. In the Conservatives’ case, that coalition runs from the Reform-adjacent populist radical Right to those who like to think of themselves as “one-nation Tories”. There is, then, no such thing as what Braverman in her poison-pen letter to Sunak referred to as “an authentic Conservative agenda” – only a series of sometimes cross-cutting, sometimes complementary Conservative tendencies. And their relative strength rises and falls depending in part on which wannabe and existing MPs happen to win or lose their seats whenever a general election rolls around. A bunch of defeats in the Red Wall in 2024, for instance, will severely (if only temporarily) weaken the populist radical Right – one reason why Braverman is unlikely to win any post-election leadership contest.

Moreover, the likelihood of any of these tendencies becoming hegemonic in the party is made all the smaller by the fact that British public opinion is wide-ranging but also thermostatic. Like the central heating kicking in when it gets too cold, Tory governments that don’t spend enough to prevent public services visibly crumbling sooner or later get replaced by a Labour government that does. And just as the heating ticks off at a certain threshold, that Labour government, having done its best to restore those services, eventually gets booted out in favour of a Tory government responding to voters grumbling about high taxes.  

Arguments about cultural issues (mainly immigration), as well as questions of leadership and competence, can disrupt and delay that turn-taking – just as they did in 2019. And that can provoke in-fighting both between and within the parties, with ginger groups within each claiming to possess the secret of electoral success. They may be right – in which case they gain the upper hand for a while. But they’re never right every time – and so they lose it again.

True blue? Who?

Because the Conservative Party’s primary goal has traditionally been to keep the other lot out of power rather than to implement a self-consciously ideological programme, it has, on balance, adapted more rapidly and more successfully than its Labour opponent. It has always been helped, too, by its historic willingness to espouse an unflinching patriotism, and by the desire shared widely on its benches to keep government spending and intervention to a minimum. This means that, contrary to appearances, there is often actually far more that unites than divides its adherents, wherever they happen to sit (or claim to sit) on the Conservatives’ ideological continuum. 

Johnson sometimes challenged that unity. While he is vaunted on the Right for Brexit and trouncing Corbyn, he was far happier than Cameron to allow both spending and immigration figures to soar. For all his electoral achievements, Johnson’s opportunism on these two critical issues tugged at the social and economic threads binding the party’s disparate wings. This week’s irony is that, just as he is being derided as the embodiment of a regressive move to the soft centre, Cameron’s traditional views on spending and immigration may help glue the shards of a fractured parliamentary party together.

None of this means, of course, that Sunak will be able to turn things around electorally by next year. Nor does it mean that, should he fail to do so, the party will necessarily make a quick return to office. After all, it took 13 years (and a global financial crash) after 1997, and even then Cameron failed to win a majority. 

Moreover, flirting with populist Right-wing politics is one thing. Swallowing it whole – even if only for a while – is quite another, especially in a country that statistics show, to the frustration and fury of some, is becoming more multicultural and more socially liberal with each passing year. That is a warning to ambitious leadership hopefuls on the Tory Right like Braverman and Kemi Badenoch: it is dangerous to pull faces when the wind is changing; you don’t want to get stuck in the wrong pose.

Originally published at https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2023/11/18/tories-change-direction-david-cameron-conservatives-sunak

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