In October 2005, one of the candidates in a watershed Tory leadership election gave a speech at the party’s annual conference, in the wake of its third consecutive election defeat.
“We’ve got to recognise that we’re in third place amongst under-35s, that we’ve lost support amongst women, that public servants no longer think we’re on their side, that the people with aspirations who swept Margaret Thatcher to power have drifted away from our party,” said David Cameron. “We have to change and modernise our culture and attitudes and identity.” These shifts, he said, would have to be deep and wide, and show that “we’re comfortable with modern Britain”.
Here we are again, with yet another Tory contest, amid electoral wreckage that is both familiar and even more forlorn. Last month, the party’s placing among 18-24s and 25-30s was fifth: in both those categories, it ended up with a truly miserable 8% of the vote. Across the home counties and beyond, the list of classically “aspirational” former Tory heartlands it lost extends into the distance. But there is now an additional element of the party’s woes that causes it no end of angst: Nigel Farage and Reform UK, a confounding force seen as friend and foe.
Among the Tory MPs now tussling to resolve these problems and lead their party out of its electoral dead end, one legacy of the modernisation drive that happened two decades ago is plain to see. Only half the candidates are white, and two of the leading contenders are women of colour – something that surely shames a ruling Labour party still seemingly unable to shake off its addiction to white men.
But the fact that those two aspiring leaders are Kemi Badenoch and Priti Patel also shows how flimsy most of Cameron’s revolution proved to be. Along with Robert Jenrick (once a politically shapeless Tory journeyman, now a reborn anti-immigration populist who reportedly wants to bring back the Rwanda scheme), they apparently believe that – although voters don’t know it yet – belligerent, anti-modern Toryism would still be a winning credo if only their party would consistently follow it. Patel thinks that unreconstructed Tory values “are still shared by a majority of the electorate, including young people”; as Badenoch sees it, her party’s recent history is reducible to the fact that it “talked right yet governed left”.
Somewhere in these bizarre arguments is one kernel of truth, to do with how rudderless the Tories have been for a very long time. It has been hard to keep up with all the party’s ideological cartwheeling, from Cameron’s half-ideas about the “big society”, through “blue collar Conservatism” and Boris Johnson’s feeble plans for levelling up, to Liz Truss’s month-long reversion to Thatcherism. But as Patel, Jenrick and Badenoch are proving, a few strands of modern Toryism have been amazingly resilient: a staunch faith in the wonders of Brexit, and the culture-war belligerence and indulgence of base prejudice that often go with it. Those beliefs, in fact, continue to define the sweet spot of the Tory membership – and in the midst of a suddenly ugly summer, that puts the leadership battle in an increasingly awkward context.
Most Conservatives presumably look at the orchestrated hatred and violence that have followed the murders in Southport and feel much the same revulsion as everyone else. But some vocal elements of the political right have reacted very differently, focusing not on the criminality of fascist thugs, but on crass arguments about multiculturalism that actually cast the rioters in a sympathetic light.
Badenoch, shamefully enough, has joined in, claiming the horrific events of the last week show “we need a clearer strategy on integration” – if you’re defending your mosque against neo-Nazis, there’s the solution: integrate more – and bemoaning a “culture of silence” around the alleged effects of immigration, while railing against “the cultural establishment”. That is a striking position for a leading figure in the supposed party of law and order to take. And it is yet another example of a long history of behaviour that ought to be the trigger for some calm and measured Tory soul-searching.
“We want our country back” – a chant regularly heard over the past week – is a slogan that has been used most loudly by Farage, but that language first entered the modern political mainstream in 2001, thanks to a speech by the then Tory leader William Hague. Anyone looking for an example of how ideas and language spread out of the far-right undergrowth should recall Suella Braverman’s brief spell as home secretary, when she claimed that people crossing the Channel amounted to an “invasion”, and responded to far-right violence outside hotels commandeered by her department with the twisted suggestion that “the alleged behaviour of some asylum seekers is never an excuse for violence and intimidation”. Another big issue has been festering for years: Islamophobia, an apparently ingrained Tory problem that has never been dealt with.
All this blurs into the sense that whatever the candidates say about him, far too many Tories admire Farage, and their ardour seems to be growing (at the last Tory conference, let us not forget, Patel jubilantly danced with him, to the Frankie Valli classic Can’t Take My Eyes Off You). No political organisation that professes to have any kind of ethical compass, let alone any hope of being in government, should be taking its cues from someone who responded to the Southport murders by putting up online videos full of tacit nods to the far right. But that is exactly what seems to be happening.
The election result shows where a continuing Tory march to the right will lead: towards an almost amoral brand of politics, and an ever older and more marginal electoral base. The only route back, by contrast, looks long and arduous, and it will have to go through the suburbs and affluent towns the Conservatives have so comprehensively left behind. Their key problem in those places is that they no longer look like the party for people who are successful, or aspire to be – but rather, a mess of arcane and often toxic grievances and obsessions. Put another way, if Conservatism reduces itself to a conduit for irate old men in Wetherspoon’s, it will come close to political extinction.
In the short to medium term, Tories might realise that the first steps to revival should be about tone rather than any policy specifics, and the need for Conservatives to sound far less angry and entitled. But as Labour’s time in government goes on, a familiar political gap may well open up – for a party of low taxation, entrepreneurialism, property ownership and the kind of libertarianism the Tories seem to have all but forgotten. To firm up the sort of political coherence the party has long since mislaid, those elements could be wrapped up not in a sour loathing of modern Britain, but an acceptance of what it holds dear (a public NHS, for instance), along with its multifaceted diversity. This could be underpinned by a belated understanding that what they sometimes malign as “identity politics” is a product of the choice and personal autonomy that Tories have always claimed to believe in.
Past evidence suggests they might begin to finally rise to such a challenge in about 2032, but with Farage harassing and confusing them, the timescale could be much longer. Clued-up Conservatives will therefore need a few things that seem to be in short supply: deep thought and patience, and the moral integrity that the party’s seething, furious mindset increasingly seems to have put beyond its reach.
John Harris is a Guardian columnist
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