If some mechanism existed for bringing polling day forward to this coming Thursday, I wonder how many Conservative candidates would pull the lever, taking an electoral beating now that they must otherwise dread for another fortnight.
Plan A has failed, and there is no other. The prime minister hoped that polls would narrow in the campaign, as they often have done in the past. Labour would be spooked. A Conservative comeback would gain momentum in the frenzy of Fleet Street gratitude for a narrative twist and a competitive race. But hope is not a strategy.
Ministers have resorted to pleading with voters not to give Keir Starmer too big a majority. There is a deficit of drama in the contest to be prime minister. The gap is filled with speculation over the size and character of Britain’s next opposition.
Convention dictates that this be construed as a civil war. On one side is the remnant of the traditional Tory party that David Cameron led until 2016. These are MPs who mostly voted remain and endorsed Theresa May’s Brexit deal. They venerate fiscal discipline and managerial sobriety. They are moderate, at least by demeanour and in comparison with the other side – a messy coalition of nationalist demagogues, social reactionaries, libertarian ultras and Brexit puritans who hanker for congress with Nigel Farage’s Reform party.
In reality, the lines are blurred. Vibes count for more than policy. Rishi Sunak was the moderates’ choice in the 2022 leadership contest against Liz Truss, who ran as the Boris Johnson continuity candidate. Truss had been a remainer in 2016. Sunak got no credit for his superior Brexit credentials.
In many respects, Johnson’s instincts were to the left of both of them. He had no qualms about state intervention when it came to levelling up, building infrastructure and accelerating the transition to a low-carbon economy. Sunak jettisoned those goals.
The current prime minister’s record doesn’t match his designation as a moderate. His first choice of home secretary was Suella Braverman. The immigration policy they co-authored took the hardline template designed by Priti Patel and hardened it.
Sunak benefited from a gloss of competence carried over from his handling of the pandemic as chancellor. He acquired an aura of pragmatism by virtue of not being Truss, although they are more alike than either cares to admit.
Both are Thatcher fetishists. Both put their faith in tax cuts to generate prosperity and reject the idea that government should engineer a fair distribution of the proceeds. The main difference is that Truss provoked a global market recoil by refusing to say how a shortfall in revenue would be recouped. Sunak has that angle notionally covered with a plan for sustained, eye-watering budget austerity.
The ideological alignment is explicit in a recording of comments Jeremy Hunt recently made to a Conservative audience. He said he “set out to achieve some of the same things” as Truss, but on a more gradual trajectory.
He also praised the former prime minister for “accepting the mistakes she had made with good grace.” If so, she must have done this in private, because her public account of what went wrong is an unrepentant, self-pitying conspiracy theory about deep-state sabotage.
The chancellor is no stranger to the craft of making moderate excuses for wild notions. In the 2019 leadership contest, Hunt was notionally the sensible alternative to Johnson in the final round. On the big issue of the moment, he took the view that Britain could crash out of the EU without a deal, and pick up the pieces afterwards. Johnson denied that there would be any breakage to repair, and won easily.
That was the Rubicon for realist Tory MPs of the old school. They knew a no-deal Brexit would be a calamity. They knew Johnson was a compulsive liar. The few who put up resistance – voting to allow the Commons to seize control of the Brexit timetable – were purged. The party of Ken Clarke, Philip Hammond, David Gauke, Dominic Grieve, Rory Stewart and others was driven into exile.
To continue being a Conservative meant signing up for Boris fandom and the cult of Brexit rapture. Some were guided by conviction, others by ambition and inertia. The subsequent landslide election victory vindicated the Johnsonian method: campaign against economic gravity; suffocate awkward choices in an ideological comfort blanket.
Now gravity is having its revenge and many Tory candidates pine for the old giddy weightlessness. They forget public revulsion over Partygate. They solicit Johnson’s endorsement as if he is the missing fuel to get their grounded campaigns airborne. They invoke the old “Boris effect” as the only force capable of rivalling Farage at voter magnetism. But the voters they have in mind are not the ones that can keep the Tories in power.
Since 2019, about 1.7 million people have switched allegiance from Conservative to Labour. It is a vast electoral swing, one of the largest on record. Downing Street has given up even trying to reverse it. These are people who tell pollsters their biggest concerns are the cost of living and crumbling public services. Tax cuts are at the bottom of the list.
Some have voted Tory in every election since 2005. Johnson’s malfeasance drove many away; Truss provoked an exodus. Sunak has nothing to say that can win them back. He is fishing in the pool of voters who say they won’t vote at all or are leaning to Reform. But he also doesn’t want to demean himself by actively repudiating Farage’s agenda. He picked the fight but now won’t stoop to making the argument.
It isn’t even clear what that would sound like. The prime minister who made “stop the boats” his mantra is not going to denounce Reform’s sinister fixation on repelling migrants. Nor can Sunak ridicule Farage’s phoney budget figures that pretend vast tax cuts can be afforded by scrapping chunks of the state. That doubles as a caricature of his own manifesto. Then, of course, there is the ultimate taboo – beware the charlatan who prescribed Brexit as a national tonic and now comes peddling the old poison in new bottles.
No Tory can say that now and none will say it after the election. Not even the moderates who think it. They know they can’t regain control of their party by declaring their heresies aloud. But because they are heretics at heart, they can never sound authentic in espousing the post-Brexit creed.
There will be some bitter arguments and an ugly blame game after the election. But it isn’t really going to amount to a Tory civil war or anything as grand as a battle for the soul of the party. Civil wars need two armies equally committed to the fight. When one side adopts all the terms and conditions dictated by the other, it’s called a surrender. And if there were enough moderates capable of winning a struggle for the Conservative soul, it might not have been sold in the first place.
Rafael Behr is a Guardian columnist
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