The Conservatives have embraced the spirit of opposition with the arrogance of a party that is used to being in government. Their conference in Manchester is a festival of complaint about the condition of Britain undisturbed by contrition for having presided over its decline.
Taxes are too high, they say, and borders are too porous. International human rights treaties are too binding; teachers are not doing enough teaching; police are not doing enough policing; there are too few doctors and too many civil servants. Children spend too long on their phones; benefit claimants are too lazy; speed limits are too low.
The Tories don’t like a country that is shaped by 13 years of their rule but prefer not to take responsibility. They have developed a keen reflex for diverting blame.
The habit was embedded in the years of strife between the referendum vote for Brexit and its enactment after Boris Johnson’s landslide election victory.
The cost of disentangling Britain from the EU was a monumental fact denied by advocates of the cause. The more it intruded on negotiations, the fiercer grew their attachment to denial.
Thus wedded to avoidance of reality and armed with a plebiscitary mandate, hardline Eurosceptics construed politics as a battle between the faithful and the unbelievers; between the will of the people and a wicked plot to subvert it.
That rhetoric cuts against the grain of representative democracy, which recognises the legitimacy of dissent and makes sincere efforts to negotiate between opposing interests.
Democrats navigate plural wills of a complex multitude. Refusal to engage with that challenge is a hallmark of populism and it locks any movement into a cycle of failure and blame.
An ill-conceived plan, having no foundation in reality, cannot satisfy grievances that populists mobilise to win elections. They dare not concede that critics of the plan were right, so instead they must vilify them as the obstruction to progress. Having defeated facts on the road to power, the revolution sustains itself on perpetual war against reality and its institutional redoubts in the pre-revolutionary establishment.
That impulse can propel populists even when they cease to be popular – or never were, as in the case of Liz Truss. The least successful prime minister of all time addressed a packed auditorium in Manchester. Her message was unrepentant evangelism for a policy programme that she maintains was traduced by servants of discredited orthodoxy before it could bear fruit.
This is the defence of all utopian zealots who keep their theories pure by rebranding failure as faulty implementation. So it is with Brexit, which swiftly transitioned from heroic adventure, brimming with opportunity, to elegised ambition, sabotaged by cowards and traitors. The intervening stage of blissful Brexit reality lasted only as long as it took for a cork to leave a champagne bottle at 11pm on 31 January 2020. Most people slept through it.
Appropriately, Nigel Farage was in the audience for Truss’s event. The former Ukip and Brexit party leader was admitted to the conference in his capacity as a presenter on GB News, but his presence underlined the complete capture of Britain’s ruling party by a movement that was once recognised as a hostile force by Tory leaders.
Farage can now stroll around the secure zone of a Tory conference like a conqueror on occupied territory or, as many conference delegates would see it, a hero of the resistance post-liberation.
Rishi Sunak’s status as leader of this hybrid entity is increasingly ceremonial. Factional feuding and posturing for the succession make the Tories unruly, but those are conventional fissures in the edifice of a party that is languishing in opinion polls and exhausted by a long incumbency.
The merger with Faragism introduced a more profound faultline that the prime minister cannot straddle. It is the division between a concept of politics that aspires to deliver operable government and one that exists exclusively for protest. One addresses public anger, the other exploits it.
Angry opposition mode is incompatible with functional administration. It flees responsibility, despises compromise and licenses outlandish excursions into the political fringe in pursuit of new grievances to mine.
Mark Harper, the transport secretary, was once reputed to stand on the sensible wing of his party. On Monday he told Tory delegates he was “calling time on the misuse of so-called 15-minute cities”, which he characterised as a “sinister” plot by local authorities to ration road use and monitor shopping habits with CCTV. The 15-minute city is a harmless concept for pedestrian-friendly urban planning – except in the twisted imaginations of far-right conspiracy theorists and, it seems, Sunak’s cabinet.
Fringe meetings in Manchester seethe with dread of “the Blob” (a catch-all term covering civil servants, local councils that aren’t controlled by Tories, academia, the creative industries and non-governmental organisations). Speakers decry the suffocation of freedom by wokery (a super-villainous reincarnation of the enemy formerly known as “political correctness gone mad”).
Such targets are necessary surrogates for “Brussels”, which served for so long as the mythic origin of British decline. But the fanatical embrace of Euroscepticism was itself a coping strategy for Tories who had no ideological successor doctrine to Thatcherism after Thatcher, and still don’t.
No subsequent Conservative leader has articulated a purpose more inspiring than national renaissance by means of unleashed enterprising spirit. Adherents to the creed have stuck doggedly to that mission, like marauding knights after a crusade, unable to adjust to civilian life, re-enacting old battles against new infidels.
The spectacle that has unfolded in Manchester this week is not just the endgame of a tired government. It is the late stages of moral and intellectual putrefaction. It is a once great party, hollowed out by a parasitical protest movement, collapsing into a parody of itself.
Except nothing about it is funny for as long as the Conservatives are still in office and able to dictate the terms of national debate. There is something corrosive of democracy in the obligation to take seriously a party that has given up on serious government. And there is something disturbing about a regime that is too ridiculous to trust with power yet is too powerful to be written off with ridicule.
Rafael Behr is a Guardian columnist
