Inside the Tory party sinkhole, its denizens pretend to understand what has befallen them, but they act like the undead who haven’t realised they have passed over. Is this the bourn from which no traveller returns? Quite possibly: not one scintilla of a new idea upsets the quiet of the Conservative grave.
All the reasons why are on display. Liz Truss the unrepentant is welcomed. Same old, same old: should have stuck with me, she says – I would have done better than Rishi Sunak. There is the insufferable Lord (David) Frost rubbishing net zero, arguing that renewables are too expensive, gas is king, and who needs windmills when we can have nuclear power? Just “adapt” to climate change, he says. The cheers and claps for him from middle-aged and older people were the hottest passion I encountered in Birmingham: only younger delegates cheered pro-net zero speakers, though they are more attuned to the 77% of voters who worry about the climate crisis.
Some of them really do try hard. There are fringe meetings with titles such as What went wrong? An election postmortem, where the pollster and 2019 manifesto author Rachel Wolf bravely said: “We are loathed. Don’t underestimate the mountain to be climbed.” A devastating report from the thinktank Onward warns that “the party could easily disappear”. But as the politics professor Tim Bale says, there’s an “eerily familiar conviction” that it is still Britain’s “natural party of government”.
Yes, they messed up, they all agree. Bad things happened, from Boris Johnson and Partygate to Truss ramping up everyone’s mortgage repayments. The campaign was a mistimed catastrophe, with Sunak’s flight from the D-day event and police investigating Tory MPs for election date bets with inside information. Yes, that 24% vote was their worst defeat ever. And so on. Yet on they go with their tug of war between the right – seeking northern “red wall” votes that were lost to Reform UK – and the others – pursuing those southern votes lost to the Lib Dems.
They don’t, can’t, maybe never will understand that their crisis is far more frighteningly profound. The fundamental tenets of everything Conservatives believe are now so rebarbative that whenever they open their mouths, out jump frogs that scare most people.
The wonder is why the four contenders for the leadership want this most fragile of crowns. Any opinion they proffer beyond the ineffably banal is a gaffe, exposing how toxic Tory views have become.
Take the small state, the Conservatives’ foundational creed: less government, less regulation, keep more of your own money, step away and leave it all to individual responsibility. But this party is light years from understanding how its austerity experiment killed off growth, causing higher costs and higher taxes. That won’t be forgotten or forgiven. Everyone sees denuded public services, a “broken” NHS, schools stripped of arts and sports, terrible transport, a crisis in housing, the courts, police and prisons, and rising poverty. Yet the Conservatives still can’t hear the great majority out there who want more government – a lot more of it. They want good public services that are fully functioning and safe. Listen out for the Tories’ new euphemism: “streamlined government”.
Can tax cuts save them? Mel Stride from one platform bemoaned bleakly: “We offered a huge £18bn in tax cuts. £18bn!” But it doesn’t work any more. People have rumbled that tax is the necessary price for good services.
This pivot towards social democratic thinking came from the deep shock of the pandemic. Even a rightwing Conservative government, against all its instincts, had to protect lives and livelihoods. Only the state guarded against death and destitution. Why does the right constantly replay and writhe over the memory of the pandemic, claiming that masks, isolation and furlough were too drastic and costly? It’s because they know that was a national psychological turning point. The nanny state saved us. “Covid reset what the public believes the state should do,” says YouGov’s Patrick English. “But the Conservatives don’t want the conversation.”
Any Tory calling for a shrunken state will have to tell us what, exactly, they will do less of. Kemi Badenoch fell straight into that trap when she suggested that maternity pay was “excessive” (it’s among the lowest in the OECD). She rambled into a no-go zone when musing that in the future, NHS reform might mean charging: “I don’t think we are ready for changing the principle of free at the point of use, certainly not immediately.” Not now, not ever. As Labour discovered the hard way, no cuts are currently tolerable. Not even the means-testing of the winter fuel allowance. Not even when the outgoing Spectator editor’s millionaire friend boasts of spending his on an exceptional bottle of wine once a year.
What’s left of Conservatism when its signature privatisations of rail, mail, water, social care and council housing have collapsed into spectacular unpopularity? The war on regulationended in tragedy at Grenfell. Brexit will increasingly be seen as a bizarre act of national sabotage. Daring to admit it would signal a start to recovery, but don’t hold your breath. The longer the Tories cling to it, the less the young people they inflicted it on will vote for them: the party came fourth among the under 40s, Stride warns, and first only among those older than 64.
The leadership contenders fight over things such as the European court of human rights that the public cares little about. On the right, Danny Kruger (a Jenrickite) told one meeting: “We need to win the culture war.” More in Common polling shows overwhelming public non-interest in that stuff. On the left, in the beleaguered One Nation caucus, only four MPs attended to hear Tom Tugendhat introduced as “the next prime minister of the most successful party in the world”, to declare – well, nothing much.
Meanwhile, influencers of the right encourage the hallucinations. As Paul Marshall, a major investor in GB News, swallows up the Spectator, Bale warns them all of “a media and thinktank milieu whose concerns and preconceptions bear far too little relation to those of the average Brit”. Immigration matters to all parties, but it’s only the vote-decider for Reform UK voters.
The Tories’ Cassandra, Theresa May, who once warned that some people saw them as the “nasty party”, warns that “we lost because we had trashed our brand” while “dancing to the tune” of Nigel Farage. But no one listens to Cassandra. The Tories’ only hope is that whoever wins has been lying through their teeth to their tiny reactionary electorate, and afterwards emerges with something – anything – new to say.
Right now, this party draws its false comfort from gloating over Labour’s early missteps. Look, the old pendulum will swing back, they say. See how hard Labour is finding government! Their comfort zone cossets them. It tells them that if they just wait for Labour to fail, all will be well. Hasta la vista. But maybe not.
Polly Toynbee is a Guardian columnist
