The founder of an influential Conservative thinktank is to quit his post, accusing the government of betraying his generation as it faces stagnant wages and little help with punishing housing and childcare costs.
Ryan Shorthouse, 37, will leave the Cameronite thinktank he founded, Bright Blue, next year and told the Guardian he was deeply disillusioned with progress during the last 12 years under the Tories – saying Rishi Sunak had failed to reinvigorate Conservative vision or bring in fresh talent.
“The Tory government has failed my generation – millennials – who have come of age and entered the labour market under 12 years of Tory rule, with punishing housing and childcare costs – combined with stagnant wages – preventing the building blocks of what Conservatives believe make the good life,” Shorthouse said.
“There was excitement in the 00s from millennials, who were entering the labour market, about Cameron’s Conservatives representing purpose-driven, socially minded enterprise, which has been totally lost.”
He said the party had left millennials “stuck in limbo – they want to do the things that Tories say get them to the good life, like raising a family or having a home”.
But he said it was now clear the party had no inspiration, will or vision to fix those problems. “They’ve had 12 years to fix these things and the cost of renting and owning a home is as high as ever. The costs of starting a family, particularly for women’s wages, but also the cost of childcare, is very punishing,” he added.
Shorthouse said the party had become “very bogged down in Brexit” and internal warfare – adding that he expected voters to punish the party for economic damage not just from the mini-budget under Liz Truss, but from the aftershocks of leaving the European Union.
“The reason why we’re going into the austerity, a lot of it is to do with global factors, but some of it is to do with the policies of the Tory party, the mini-budget in particular, but also Brexit has had a massive impact. A lot of people just will not forgive the Tories for having another round of austerity, which is going to be quite painful,” he said.
Shorthouse, the father of two young children, said his key moment of anger came at the mini-budget, which he said had “reversed the gains of decades of two phases of Tory modernisation in a month – with the party now again ‘the party of the rich’”.
He said the mini-budget “was very decisive … There was kind of unashamed, almost vice-signalling about that, which really blew me away”.
But he said Sunak had failed to grasp the nettle after Truss’s departure and filled the cabinet with veteran ministers, many of who had been responsible for mistakes of the past.
“Rishi Sunak is a thoughtful and decent person, but he is short-sighted politically and seems to be a bad judge of character,” Shorthouse said. “He has missed an opportunity to promote young, experienced and talented ministers to the cabinet to refresh the government, which could have been good for him and his party politically as well as improving policymaking.”
He added: “Instead, he has just shifted the deckchairs, surrounding himself with the same people who have been in charge for a long time now; the Tory government is tired and desperately needs to be led by fresh talent and ideas.”
Shorthouse, who would not say whether he would continue to be a member of the party, said he once had ambitions to be an MP, but the current political climate and culture was a major turn-off for ambitious young professionals, who saw change coming more effectively through business and enterprise.
“Politics has a profoundly serious talent problem,” he said. “The Tories have worsened it: Partygate, the continuous plotting and bad behaviour has made politics seem an even more poisonous profession.”
He said that Bright Blue had a good record of getting policies adopted by government – it was the first Conservative thinktank to call for net zero to be implemented across government. But he said the pace of change had been glacial and frustrating.
“Bright Blue came up this idea of shared parental leave for working grandparents, a good idea, and particularly at a time when people in their 50s and 60s are leaving the labour market in record numbers. The government said they would implement it in 2015. And it still hasn’t been implemented.”
Shorthouse said he now believed the Conservatives were likely to be out of government for at least two terms – and a new era of austerity “will not play to Tory strengths, as some wish and predict; it will be painful, be blamed on them and it will stick, just as the 2008 financial crisis is still blamed on the Labour party”.
He said he believed there was a fundamental mistake from the Sunak administration that they could “just focus on delivering the 2019 manifesto”, and added: “‘The ‘BBC’ – Brexit, Boris and Corbyn – that gave them that majority has now gone.”
Shorthouse said he now intends to enter the private sector after leaving Bright Blue. “People like me are now at the age where we would be deciding whether to go into politics,” he said.
“So many have now decided against … Business is much more meritocratic than politics. The quality of governing and policymaking will continue to decline if the political class does not think seriously about improving the attractiveness and reputation of politics to attract a pipeline of young talent.”
