Boris Johnson’s disgrace is only deepening. On Tuesday, the House of Commons will hear a new prime ministerial statement on so-called Partygate, trailed over the weekend as “a plea for perspective”. But from any reasonable standpoint, he will surely look shamed and desperate. Johnson reportedly faces more fines for breaking his own lockdown laws – and, by implication, further proof of his lies. May’s local elections, and now a byelection in red wall Wakefield, draw closer. And as he doggedly hangs on to power, the vacuum at the heart of his government is now impossible to ignore.
Long spells in power tend to leave parties short on ideas and devoid of any sense of purpose. But thanks partly to the prime minister’s entirely self-centred understanding of politics, this government’s sense of moral and political rot is something else again. A question now screams out for an answer that no one seems able to provide: six years on from the 2016 referendum and nearly three years into Johnson’s time at the top, what is left of British Conservatism?
Tory ideas and attitudes that once defined the party have been discarded, or drastically weakened. The old strand of centre-right, “one nation” politics that really was conservative – sceptical, nonideological and usually opposed to any radical change – still exists, but is a marginal presence, first sidelined by Thatcherism, then dealt another blow by the Conservative party’s furious embrace of Brexit. The free-market credo Thatcher used to reinvent her party still has plenty of high-profile disciples (Liz Truss and Rishi Sunak among them), but it now feels more like a nostalgic comfort blanket than a vibrant set of ideas – seriously weakened not just by its lack of answers to 21st-century problems, but by Johnson’s professed belief in economic interventionism, and the way the pandemic has shredded no end of Tory shibboleths, not least their belief in low taxation.
Amid the “war on woke” and the rank nastiness of Priti Patel’s Home Office, David Cameron and George Osborne’s brief attempt to “modernise” their party and acquaint it with liberal social attitudes seems like ancient history. Meanwhile, many of the supposed big new ideas brought to post-Brexit Conservatism seem to have already withered away, as evidenced by the great anticlimax of “levelling up”: a bit of spending here and there, but nowhere near the great economic reformation voters were promised.
To cap it all, Johnson’s conduct – or, more to the point, his party’s acceptance of it – now threatens even its most basic articles of faith. If they wave through law-breaking and lying to parliament, how can Conservatives still claim to believe in law and order and the sanctity of British institutions? As the damage caused by Brexit piles up, the idea that the Conservatives are the party of business is also fading fast. For the foreseeable future, there ought to be plenty of room in British politics for a party of the centre-right comfortable with modernity, and attached to property ownership, limited government, a cautious approach to social change and the promise – however illusory – that the benefits of capitalism are open to everyone. But the Tories seem to be going much the way of the US Republican party, transformed over 30 or 40 years from politically stable protectors of the status quo into a volatile mess of almost neurotic obsessions and animosities, and currently just about stilled by a collective belief in one all-powerful individual.
Despite their sense of political decay, a mixture of factors – age, demographics, Brexit, our creaking electoral system and the failures of the Labour party – has kept the Tories in power. But many of these things will not last. The relevant numbers are stark: almost half of Tory voters are now over 65, and 83% are over 45. For younger people, the economic model created by Thatcher and her heirs has entailed the impossibility of home ownership, and there is fading interest in what the Tories have to offer, surely accelerated by Brexity nostalgia and nastiness: in 1983, the Conservatives won the support of 42% of those aged 18 to 24, but by 2019, that figure had halved.
Given that degree-level education now seems to tilt people away from the Tories, the fact that 50% of young people in England now go to university is a big driver of that shift. It is also worth noting deep changes in the culture and politics of many places that once gave the Tories their most loyal support: as highlighted by the party’s declining fortunes in everywhere from suburban Greater Manchester to the south-east commuter belt, an increasingly large chunk of the English middle class is now socially liberal, eco-minded and repulsed by the Tories’ increasingly reactionary instincts.
Somewhere in their collective soul, a lot of Conservatives presumably know that their current political luck will soon run out, but that nagging realisation only makes some of them more determined to upturn as many things as they can, while they still have the chance. The result is that paranoid, flailing style of politics that Johnson has decided is his best means of staying on top. Any distinction between substantial policy and desperate gimmicks has long since dissolved. The prime minister and his allies seem to have precious little to say about the everyday realities of people’s lives. Everything centres on his apparently amoral attitude to power and a growing array of enemies: judges, “leftwing lawyers”, broadcasters, teachers. The abiding impression is of people with a rabid disdain not just for the conventions of politics and power, but for liberal democracy itself.
In 2020, the British political writer Edmund Fawcett published a compelling work of history titled Conservatism: The Fight for a Tradition, whose story runs from the 19th century to the present day. “To survive, let alone flourish, liberal democracy needs the right’s support,” he wrote. “It needs, that is, conservatives who accept liberal and democratic ground rules … When, as now, the right hesitates or denies its support, liberal democracy’s health is at risk.”
He added: “With the left in retreat, both intellectually and in party terms, the right commands politics at present. But which right is that? Is it the broadly liberal conservatism that underpinned liberal democracy’s post-1945 successes or an illiberal hard right claiming to speak for ‘the people’?” When I reread those words last week, the home secretary was in Rwanda, announcing a policy on refugees seemingly inspired by a work of dystopian fiction, while the prime minister continued to think he ought to be allowed get away with breaking the law and then endlessly lying about it. Once again, it was obvious which side they had picked.
For any Conservatives who remain genuinely conservative, that ought to be an urgent reason to get rid of their leader and at least attempt to reconnect their party with coherence, sense and the basic responsibilities that come with power. Maybe the rot is now too deep; perhaps expecting any moral course of action from a political force so used to shamelessness and cruelty is a vain hope. But if only to pull our system of government back from a complete moral void, if consciences once again stir and a few Tories start to move, the rest of us ought to quietly cheer them on.
John Harris is a Guardian columnist. To listen to his podcast Politics Weekly UK, search “Politics Weekly UK” on Apple, Spotify, Acast or wherever you get your podcasts. New episodes every Thursday
