The Strange and Self-Inflicted Death of Tory England

The classic book The Strange Death of Liberal England attempted to explain the rapid decline into irrelevance of the once-powerful Liberal Party. A week in London speaking with political observers has convinced me that the Conservative Party is likely on a similar path.

Its decline, though, is neither strange nor hard to explain. In fact, the only strange thing about the Tory retreat is that they keep choosing the very route that will lead to their demise.

Writing these words six years ago would have been unthinkable. Led by Boris Johnson, the Conservatives won their largest parliamentary majority since 1983 by sweeping the Labour Party’s working-class heartlands. Their blend of traditional centre-right voters with populist former centre-left supporters looked to be the wave of the future.

This was all thrown away in their time in office. Johnson delivered Brexit but virtually every other part of the party’s promises went unfulfilled.

The left-behind working-class towns that gave him the majority were not “levelled up” as promised. Public services did not improve; taxes did not decline; wokeness galloped forward.

Most importantly, net migration soared. Johnson and the Tories had promised to reduce the number of immigrants entering the United Kingdom, but instead they reached record highs.

These failures opened space to the party’s populist Right, and Nigel Farage’s Reform Party stormed into the picture to fill it. On election night, the new party had received 14 per cent of the vote and captured five seats.

The Tories still finished second with nearly 24 per cent but lost over 240 seats to drop to a mere 121. Easily the worst result in the party’s long history, one would think the remaining MPs would take stock of the disaster and move quickly to undo the damage.

That’s where the strange part of the story begins. The debacle’s cause was obvious: Roughly half of their voters from 2019 had defected, with a majority of those going to Farage’s Reform. Recovery should have involved rapidly regaining credibility with those people and then moving to recapture backing from the less ideologically conservative people who had defected leftward.

The party instead selected Kemi Badenoch as their leader, rejecting the more outwardly populist Robert Jenrick and the more moderate James Cleverly. Badenoch’s ascension foretold the party’s true leanings: It still clung to the notion that it was a broad church of the whole British right and thus needed to focus more on unity than on rebirth.

To say Badenoch has underwhelmed in office is to understate matters. She has delayed making broad pronouncements, saying that a thorough review of policy needs to occur first. That seems prudent to lifelong Tories but looks irresponsible to conservatives and populists who see their country on the brink.

Farage, a generational political talent, has again taken advantage of the room the Tories are giving him. He’s making news regularly while Badenoch, who has the advantage of the weekly prime minister’s Question Time as the leader of the opposition, fails to land any punches.

The result is that the Conservatives got annihilated in May’s local elections, losing 674 seats and control of all the councils they had dominated beforehand. Reform won ten councils and picked up 677 seats.

Things have gotten even worse for the Conservatives since then. They are now on 15 per cent in the polls while Reform is nation’s strongest party with 29 per cent.

That would give Reform 352 seats, according to the respected Nowcast model, nearly as many as the Tories won in 2019. Conservatives would drop to a mere 31, essentially reduced to upper-income redoubts whose voters just cannot stomach the pint-swilling, fag-smoking Farage.

The course forward is again obvious. Tack sharply Right so that Conservatives regain backing from conservatives. Instead, the party’s latest mantra is fiscal stability.

I’m sure the Tories in their private clubs, Savile Row suits, and quaint homes in the shires and the Home Counties love this. But that’s a small and shrinking audience. The bulk of their former voters want to tackle immigration, fight back against woke progressivism, and retake their country.

That takes energy and a fighting spirit. The Tories today seem to think those attitudes are themselves unconservative.

Worse, many have taken to making derogatory comments about Reform rather than fighting for their voters. Shadow Chancellor Sir Mel Stride recently said Reform was “not a party of the Right” while former Cabinet Minister David Gauke argues that Conservatives should not even try to compete with Reform for voters on the populist Right.

Well over half of the people who voted Tory in 2019 now back Reform. How a party regains power by saying good riddance to its voters is a mystery.

Perhaps the threat of imminent political death will concentrate the Tory minds. Badenoch has a one year grace period from being removed under party rules that expires on November 2. A mere 18 MPs could trigger a vote of confidence in her and force her removal or resignation.

But that leader then faces the same choices that she has avoided to make. Tack sharply to the Right as needed and there will be loads of pushback from the Tory Left. The new leader will then have to choose between unifying the Right or unifying the party.

I noted in conversations this week that this is exactly the situation the Tories faced in mid-2019. Their failure to deliver Brexit had soured their voters on them. They finished fifth in the late May election to the European Union parliament, winning only 9 per cent as Nigel Farage’s Brexit Party won with 31 per cent. Polls for the parliamentary election showed the Tories on roughly 18 per cent with Farage’s Brexit Party in the lead.

The party swung into action, making populist Brexiteer Boris Johnson their new leader. Johnson relentlessly hammered away on making Brexit happen.

September 3, 2019 was the key date in this political resurrection. Johnson suspended 21 MPs, including nine former Cabinet ministers, from the party for refusing to back the party line on Brexit. Johnson lost any hope of controlling the floor of the House of Commons at that point; the rebels could remove him from government at any time if they could agree with all the other opposition parties on a replacement.

Rarely has any leader risked his own defenestration and split his party on principle. But it worked. He proved to wary Britons that the Conservatives were serious about achieving Brexit, and that saved the party. The historic majority soon followed.

The uncomfortable silence that inevitably followed when I said the Tories would have to do this again told me all I needed to know. Many know what to do, but they lack the conviction to do it.

When the Conservative Party hits its nadir and passes into the political shadows, it will not take a Hercule Poirot or Sherlock Holmes to uncover the killer. The murderer will be Mr Tory, in the drawing room, from a self-inflicted blow to the head.