For Tory moderates – assuming some still exist – these ought to be quietly promising times. Their party’s extremists have made a huge mess of the last four Conservative governments, both as participants and critics. They may have discredited radical rightwing politics in the eyes of most voters for many years to come.
The failure of Brexit, which many Tory moderates predicted, and of populist Conservatism’s other miracle cures, may see the Tory right decimated at the coming election: favourable circumstances, you might think, for moderates to shape any party rebuilding.
Officially, there are still a lot of them: the One Nation group of Tory MPs – “committed to the values of the liberal centre right”, according to its website – has more than 100 members, almost a third of the shrinking parliamentary party. Despite all the lurches to the right by Rishi Sunak’s government, there are still supposed moderates in the cabinet, on popular political podcasts and radio shows and in the House of Lords, where this week they picked holes in the bodged-together and nasty Rwanda bill. Ken Clarke, Rory Stewart, the chancellor, Jeremy Hunt, the foreign secretary, David Cameron: Tory centrists, real and imagined, remain prominent in Britain’s political conversation.
Now, as always, they perform a crucial role for the party. Their existence persuades voters who lean right but who don’t like Conservatism to be too harsh or divisive that the Tories are – despite all the evidence to the contrary – a sensible, diverse, basically decent party. Meanwhile, journalists, political scientists and even some people on the left who believe in the essential moderation of British politics, also find these Tories reassuring. The benefit of the doubt and the respect they receive are like those enjoyed by some of the upper classes and the royal family. In a highly unequal country, the belief that parts of the establishment are restrained and conscientious in their exercise of power is politically calming.
Yet what if the civilising influence of the Tory moderates is a myth? There is little evidence that they have significantly shaped their modern party’s policies or leadership choices. Since Margaret Thatcher in 1975, the Conservatives have consistently elected leaders from the right, or leaders who have become more rightwing in office such as Sunak, Cameron and William Hague.
Tory leaders have sometimes faced discontent from the party’s centre and left, such as the anti-Thatcher “wets”, but as her dismissive label for them suggests, such figures have rarely stopped the right from getting its way. From drastically deregulating the economy in the 1980s and 1990s to imposing austerity and restricting the right to protest in the 2010s and 2020s, Conservative governments have relentlessly disrupted social structures and removed safety nets and freedoms that Tory moderates are supposed to value and protect.
Sometimes, as with Brexit, they have simply not had the numbers to stop the rightward shift, which has been accelerated by an increasingly reactionary party membership and Conservative press. Yet on other occasions the moderates have been unwilling to challenge the right, or have even been complicit with it. These two responses tell us something important about Toryism.
Power-seeking and pragmatism are always regarded as Conservative hallmarks. But much less attention is paid to how these instincts cause Tory moderates to accept rightwing policies and sometimes promotion into highly reactionary cabinets, when the right is dominant in the party and among its media and electoral supporters, as it is now.
Unlike the Labour left, the Tory left rarely mounts lonely rebellions against its leaders in the Commons for year after year. This could be because the Tory left believes in less than its Labour equivalent: it lacks an ideology as coherent and stubborn as socialism. Or it could be that, deep down, Conservative moderates believe in many of the same things – social hierarchy, the free market, a traditional approach to patriotism and culture – as their supposed opponents on the right of the party. The Tory thinktank Onward, for example, says it is on the “centre right” but urges the government to take a “much tougher approach” to crime and to defend “our national cultural norms” against “elite minorities”. In today’s angry, populist Tory party, even the moderates can sound like extremists.
Long ago, from roughly the late 1930s to the mid-1970s, the Conservatives did contain a more convincing and potent centre right, led by prime ministers such as Edward Heath and Harold Macmillan. They sometimes criticised big business, and accepted trade unions as legitimately powerful institutions. Yet this centrism was in part a pragmatic response to a more equal, more politically contested Britain. Now that this country has returned to Victorian levels of inequality, with Conservative voters disproportionately among the winners, the motivation for Tory moderates to stand up for even limited forms of social justice is much weaker. In its distribution of power and resources, if not its values, Britain has become a more rightwing society, and Tory moderates have moved rightwards accordingly.
Could a more genuine Conservative moderation rise again? Given that much of the party and Tory media think that the main problem with Sunak’s government is that it is not right wing enough – a sign of how extreme Toryism has become – a shift further rightwards feels more likely. The last time the party lost power, in 1997, it took eight years, three further rightwing leaders and two more election defeats for it to accept that not enough voters still wanted a harsh Conservatism, and to elect the more liberal Cameron as leader instead.
For the current Tory journey towards the far right to go into reverse, some of the impetus will probably have to come from outside the party. Labour will need to be in office for more than one term and make Britain a fairer, less angry place, where hard-right Conservatism seems out of date.
If Keir Starmer becomes prime minister, he will have many tasks that seem more pressing than helping to moderate the Conservative party. In the short term, it may suit Labour electorally for the Tories to be an extreme party. But in the longer term, when the formidably resilient Conservatives are likely to recover, if Tory moderation remains largely a myth, then the party’s extremists will return to office, and get to work on this country all over again.
Andy Beckett is a Guardian columnist
