To instantly understand what this election means for the Conservative party, look no further than the departing Tory politician who has been centrally involved in most of the lurches, victories and meltdowns of the past 14 years. A lot of Michael Gove’s record is bound up with the David Cameron years, and a retrogressive transformation in English education that is still rippling through our schools. But as he exits frontline politics, the most relevant stories are about his support for Brexit, leaning in to brazen populism, and overseeing the non-policy of levelling up. In all those things lie the biggest reasons for the ruling party’s deepening crisis – and, poetically enough, why the Liberal Democrats fancy their chances in Surrey Heath, the constituency Gove is leaving behind.
Like so many of his colleagues, Gove must be acutely aware of the Conservatives’ dire predicament. The election has been called because they no longer have any kind of governing project. Their internal affairs remain febrile and poisonous. And when polling stations and ballot papers come into view, their biggest problem is likely to be revealed with a new clarity: a coalition of support that has long since sprouted cracks and fissures, but now looks like it is turning into rubble.
How quickly things have changed. In 2016, the presence of Gove and Boris Johnson at the heart of the leave campaign arguably secured its era-defining success. Three years later, Johnson led his party to such a momentous win in the general election that there was talk of a lasting political realignment, whereby working-class Labour voters would completely ditch their old loyalties, and a new era of Tory hegemony would begin. But for the Conservatives, the legacy of the 2019 election played out in the worst possible way. On top of sheer incompetence and chaos, the political approach that brought them a Commons majority of 80 eventually proved to be their downfall, which brings to mind the characterisation of the Liberals’ landslide of 1906 in George Dangerfield’s The Strange Death Of Liberal England: “From that victory they never recovered.”
The night of Johnson’s famous triumph, I was in Stoke-on-Trent, which had become a byword for all the political changes crystallised by Brexit. One of the city’s three parliamentary seats had already gone from Labour to the Tories two years before; that night, the other two fell. But voters seemed to have switched sides in a very tentative and conditional way. They were repelled by Jeremy Corbyn and desperate to see an end to the Brexit pantomime, but hardly in love with the party they had backed. Just before the polling stations closed, I met a man who said he had just voted Tory for the first time. I asked him how he felt. “Not good,” he said. “Not good.”
If these people were to become habitual Tory voters, levelling up had to change from a blithe slogan into a meaningful and visible set of policies. But that never happened. Gove, who was first given the relevant ministerial brief two years after Johnson became PM, had some interesting ideas, but his boss was never serious about the promises of national rebalancing that he so casually made. Liz Truss’s neo-Thatcherite economics suggested levelling up’s antithesis.
Then, when Rishi Sunak returned Gove to levelling up duties, the idea died a quiet death: there is a clear correlation to be drawn between polling in so-called “red wall” constituencies that puts Labour about 25 points ahead, and the recent verdict of the House of Commons public accounts committee that ministers were “unable to provide any compelling examples of what levelling up funding has delivered so far”.
There is also dismay and disconnection on the Tories’ other electoral flank. Around 2018, it started to become clear that many places that might once have been considered true-blue heartlands, many of them in the English suburbs, were moving away from their old loyalties. Some of this was deep-rooted, bound up with a more liberal and educated middle class, and the culture of big cities spreading into their surrounding areas. And in that context, a lot of what was changing was also traceable to Brexit, and how the Tory turn into a hard-right populism it had soaked up from Ukip was repulsing the kind of voters Cameron had once tried to keep on side with his talk of Tory modernisation.
In big chunks of the home counties, for example, large numbers of voters had backed the remain side in the 2016 referendum. They were then treated to macho posturing about a no-deal Brexit (the nightmarish eventuality Gove was given the job of planning for), endless sneers about remoaners, and the Tories’ growing fondness for the shrill nastiness eventually embodied by the former home secretary Suella Braverman. The alienation and estrangement all that has caused now defines the Tory fears about Surrey that clearly played a role in Gove’s exit, and the mounting nervousness about seats such as Wycombe, Wokingham, Harpenden and Berkhamsted. Put those potential losses next to their expected rout in the red wall, and the reasons why Tories are feeling so bleak become even clearer.
And yet. Historically, Conservatism’s success has been founded on its openness to change, and brazen opportunism. Even now, I can just about imagine what a more credible and forward-looking Tory party might look like, and how it might eventually rebuild its support. It would be less paranoid and dogmatic, more accepting of the country it wants to govern, and aware that there are cheques it never cashed and promises it never delivered on.
It might update the patrician centrism of Conservatism in the 1950s; it could return to the more interventionist ideas that briefly came to life during Theresa May’s time at the top, and that Johnson talked up but never acted on. Occasionally, I hear more rational Tories talking, albeit very quietly, in roughly those terms. But they also tend to ask a very obvious question: with the right of politics so full of the stubborn self-righteousness it imbibed at the time of the Brexit referendum, how would that change even begin?
Political parties have a habit of responding to defeat by doubling down on what led them there. You should never completely write the Tories off, but that is surely their most likely trajectory: defeat on 4 July persuading the supposed natural party of government to fly even further towards the barren fringes of our politics, while some of the people who first sent them in that direction amble off, into the twilight.
John Harris is a Guardian columnist
