The real Conservative plot is a subversive struggle against reality. In last Thursday’s elections, the Tories lost 397 seats and Labour, the Lib Dems and the Greens gained a total of 394; in Blackpool South, the by-election swing from the Conservatives to Labour was more than 20 per cent for the fifth time in this parliament alone.
So it requires magical thinking of a high order to conclude that the public’s message to the Government was: be more Right-wing. Yet this is precisely what many of Rishi Sunak’s Tory antagonists have been claiming.
In the Telegraph at the weekend, the former home secretary Suella Braverman declared that “[o]n tax, migration, the small boats and law and order, we need to demonstrate strong leadership, not managerialism. Make a big and bold offer on tax cuts, rather than tweaking as we saw in the Budget. Place a cap on legal migration once and for all. Leave the ECHR.”
Lord Frost echoed her demands. Clearly, he declared, the Government needed to be “tougher on migration and the ECHR, more tax cuts, more spending cuts, deregulation, proper planning reform, fracking and a serious assault on the burden of net zero, rolling back diversity and inclusion”.
Fourteen years after David Cameron entered Downing Street as a ‘moderniser’, the centre-Right is in ruins
It was Daniel Finkelstein, now a Tory peer and columnist, who observed when he was an adviser to John Major and William Hague that the Right “wouldn’t take ‘Yes’ for an answer”. That aperçu remains true today.
Since becoming Prime Minister in October 2022, Sunak has twice cut National Insurance by 2p, with the prospect of further reductions to come; he has spent much political capital getting his Rwanda deportation policy over the legislative line; he has entrenched Brexit with the Windsor Framework; he has attacked supposedly “woke” measures and “Lefty lawyers”; he has postponed net zero targets; he has promised to cut welfare and “sicknote culture”; he has even threatened to fine rough sleepers. How much more Right-wing is he expected to be?
The answer from the new, loose-knit populist Right network — National Conservatives, Popular Conservatives, New Conservatives — is “lots more, please”. But the electoral calculus underpinning this demand is, to put it charitably, mysterious. Reform UK, of which Nigel Farage is honorary president, won a grand total of two council seats last Thursday. If the electorate really yearns for a British Donald Trump it has chosen a very funny way of expressing its wishes.
What the voters would really like, I would suggest, is a government that doesn’t tank the economy (Liz Truss), flagrantly break its own laws (Boris Johnson, partygate) or fixate on a madly expensive, entirely performative culture war strategy (Sunak, Rwanda).
Andy Street, who was defeated in his bid for a third term as West Midlands mayor, was absolutely right to call for a “modern, inclusive” form of Toryism, one that seeks social cohesion and stability through a health system that is not on its knees; decent social care; schools that aren’t crumbling; and community relations governed by dialogue rather than polarisation.
Yet where is this form of Conservatism to be found? One of the most consequential moments in the Tories’ 14 years in power was Johnson’s decision in September 2019 to withdraw the whip from 21 moderate Tory MPs during the Brexit battles — including Rory Stewart, David Gauke, Philip Hammond, Ken Clarke, Sam Gyimah and Ed Vaizey. Ten had the whip restored, but only one — Greg Clark — will be standing at the forthcoming election.
Centrist Conservatism has never truly recovered from that purge. The One Nation group of MPs still exists as a formal entity, but — for the first time in living memory — it has no real programme, coherence, or candidate-in-waiting. At most, it has been an occasional check on the more outlandish of Sunak’s parliamentary measures.
Fourteen years after David Cameron entered Number 10 as a self-styled “moderniser”, environmentalist, champion of international development and tribune of the “Big Society”, the centre-Right is in ruins.
If Labour forms a government later this year, Sunak will go, and there will be a leadership contest which will doubtless include a centrist contender (perhaps Penny Mordaunt will present herself as such). But it has been clear since the local elections that the party is in no mood to begin the long march back to sanity.
What will be on offer, in practice, will be varieties of Maga UK. In the meantime, the Government conducts itself like a religious cult in a stockade, waiting grimly for the feds to arrive.
Matthew d’Ancona is an Evening Standard columnist
