Nick Hargrave is the co-founder of Strand Partners, a communications consultancy. He is a former Downing Street Special Adviser and Global Public Affairs Director at Deliveroo.
The elephant in the room in this Conservative leadership contest is the party’s record in government over the last twelve years. Liz Truss, and to a lesser extent Rishi Sunak, have been reticent in making a case for the achievements of the period.
They’re cautious because this is not what the Conservative party’s membership wants to hear. Deep in the psyche of the average Conservative member, if perhaps not expressed directly, is that the last twelve years have been wasted ones.
To understand this counter-intuitive emotion, it is necessary to examine how the party has travelled over two decades. The typical playbook for government is that you formulate policies in opposition, get elected, go on to implement them and then you are judged on how you have done.
But the Conservative Government of recent years has been moulded in its character by massive external shocks rather than a linear body of thought. The result now is a longing for familiar and comforting tunes that are being expressed in the current leadership head-to-head.
It began when David Cameron was elected Leader in 2005. Much is said now about slick PR. But in reality his winning pitch was a substantive promise to move the party to the economic centre. His well-remembered no notes/no lectern speech at the Blackpool party conference that year included a commitment to “share the fruits of economic growth between tax reduction and public services”.
Cameron’s insight at the time was that the Conservative Party could not win a General Election without matching Labour’s spending plans during a period of unprecedented global growth and rising tax receipts. The party could not rest entirely on the hill of cutting tax.
The membership weren’t entirely convinced but they went along with it. They were tired of losing elections, they liked Cameron’s undoubted charisma mixed with a touch of reassuring Home Counties husband – not to forget a poor campaign from David Davis.
But then the first shock came; the Global Financial Crisis. It was both economically questionable and politically unwise to continue to peg the party to Gordon Brown’s spending plans. The world had materially changed. And so what then came in the period 2008/09 was a shift to the politics of deficit reduction.
It is hard to turn an oil tanker round though and the result was a confused election campaign in 2010 that tried to inelegantly meld what had gone before with the world as it was. The result was a hung Parliament and a Coalition with the Liberal Democrats, the real doorstep enemy in many Conservative constituencies. “Told you so” said the door knockers.
Out of circumstance, the Cameron governments of 2010-16 were therefore forced to govern from the economic right – but without enormous credit bestowed from the base. An election was won in 2015 by purposefully avoiding a conversation on the size of the state – and focussing instead on a simpler message of competence, contrasts with Ed Miliband, leveraging the SNP and, critically, the promise of an EU referendum to hold the UKIP flank.
The referendum promise in turn led to the second shock; Brexit. The party establishment’s opposition to leaving the EU during the referendum caused further alienation between leadership and base – compounded by Theresa May’s attempt to unknot the messy tensions of the result with her Chequers compromise.
For all the discussion of sovereignty, identity and culture that Brexit threw up, the unresolved Conservative tension on economics continued to poke through also. The Vote Leave campaign was victorious because they promised more spending on public services.
However, for many Conservative members who were a small subset of the leave coalition, Brexit meant something else: an opportunity for Britain to be a permanently smaller, lower tax deregulated state.
As we know, the unique showman talents of Boris Johnson prevented political decay at the General Election of 2019 – with questions of economics conveniently parked once again for resonant campaign slogans: this time Get Brexit Done, for a country exhausted by politics.
Before the question of what Brexit meant in reality could be answered though, the third shock came; Covid. At a time of uncertainty and fear, the public demanded an enormous expansion of the state in the moment and the Government responded.
However, this economic response to Covid has accelerated a longer-term shift in public attitudes in what the state is there to do. At various points in the last two years, a crisis of the moment has thrown up demands for more state spending and intervention; the Government has tended to oblige.
Rishi Sunak’s National Insurance rise to fund more health spending was an attempt to ground these greater expectations of the state in a frame of Conservative fiscal responsibility. Conservative members have nonetheless made their dissatisfaction with higher taxes and a bigger state clear.
The common thread through the last 12 years of Conservative rule is therefore the question left unanswered because of events: will an electorate that is moving to the left on economics vote for a Conservative Party that loudly and proudly approaches the matter from the right?
The membership certainly think so and want to finally put this to the test. A positive inflection is that this is what making the weather looks like.
The negative characterisation is that political parties do not succeed from their comfort zone. This is especially so when the shocks I have described above have been overlaid by a demographic trend where pressure on the state is really starting to bite. This is a structural trend that is deeply uncomfortable for Conservatives and they do not have an answer for it.
With Liz Truss the favourite to enter Downing Street in a few weeks’ time, we may be about to find out the answer. My instinct is that the Conservative Party’s complicated record makes the argument for a fifth term very difficult to land. The party’s most likely saving grace is another external shock that parks the argument back a few years further.
Nick Hargrave is the co-founder of Strand Partners, a communications consultancy. He is a former Downing Street Special Adviser and Global Public Affairs Director at Deliveroo.
The elephant in the room in this Conservative leadership contest is the party’s record in government over the last twelve years. Liz Truss, and to a lesser extent Rishi Sunak, have been reticent in making a case for the achievements of the period.
They’re cautious because this is not what the Conservative party’s membership wants to hear. Deep in the psyche of the average Conservative member, if perhaps not expressed directly, is that the last twelve years have been wasted ones.
To understand this counter-intuitive emotion, it is necessary to examine how the party has travelled over two decades. The typical playbook for government is that you formulate policies in opposition, get elected, go on to implement them and then you are judged on how you have done.
But the Conservative Government of recent years has been moulded in its character by massive external shocks rather than a linear body of thought. The result now is a longing for familiar and comforting tunes that are being expressed in the current leadership head-to-head.
It began when David Cameron was elected Leader in 2005. Much is said now about slick PR. But in reality his winning pitch was a substantive promise to move the party to the economic centre. His well-remembered no notes/no lectern speech at the Blackpool party conference that year included a commitment to “share the fruits of economic growth between tax reduction and public services”.
Cameron’s insight at the time was that the Conservative Party could not win a General Election without matching Labour’s spending plans during a period of unprecedented global growth and rising tax receipts. The party could not rest entirely on the hill of cutting tax.
The membership weren’t entirely convinced but they went along with it. They were tired of losing elections, they liked Cameron’s undoubted charisma mixed with a touch of reassuring Home Counties husband – not to forget a poor campaign from David Davis.
But then the first shock came; the Global Financial Crisis. It was both economically questionable and politically unwise to continue to peg the party to Gordon Brown’s spending plans. The world had materially changed. And so what then came in the period 2008/09 was a shift to the politics of deficit reduction.
It is hard to turn an oil tanker round though and the result was a confused election campaign in 2010 that tried to inelegantly meld what had gone before with the world as it was. The result was a hung Parliament and a Coalition with the Liberal Democrats, the real doorstep enemy in many Conservative constituencies. “Told you so” said the door knockers.
Out of circumstance, the Cameron governments of 2010-16 were therefore forced to govern from the economic right – but without enormous credit bestowed from the base. An election was won in 2015 by purposefully avoiding a conversation on the size of the state – and focussing instead on a simpler message of competence, contrasts with Ed Miliband, leveraging the SNP and, critically, the promise of an EU referendum to hold the UKIP flank.
The referendum promise in turn led to the second shock; Brexit. The party establishment’s opposition to leaving the EU during the referendum caused further alienation between leadership and base – compounded by Theresa May’s attempt to unknot the messy tensions of the result with her Chequers compromise.
For all the discussion of sovereignty, identity and culture that Brexit threw up, the unresolved Conservative tension on economics continued to poke through also. The Vote Leave campaign was victorious because they promised more spending on public services.
However, for many Conservative members who were a small subset of the leave coalition, Brexit meant something else: an opportunity for Britain to be a permanently smaller, lower tax deregulated state.
As we know, the unique showman talents of Boris Johnson prevented political decay at the General Election of 2019 – with questions of economics conveniently parked once again for resonant campaign slogans: this time Get Brexit Done, for a country exhausted by politics.
Before the question of what Brexit meant in reality could be answered though, the third shock came; Covid. At a time of uncertainty and fear, the public demanded an enormous expansion of the state in the moment and the Government responded.
However, this economic response to Covid has accelerated a longer-term shift in public attitudes in what the state is there to do. At various points in the last two years, a crisis of the moment has thrown up demands for more state spending and intervention; the Government has tended to oblige.
Rishi Sunak’s National Insurance rise to fund more health spending was an attempt to ground these greater expectations of the state in a frame of Conservative fiscal responsibility. Conservative members have nonetheless made their dissatisfaction with higher taxes and a bigger state clear.
The common thread through the last 12 years of Conservative rule is therefore the question left unanswered because of events: will an electorate that is moving to the left on economics vote for a Conservative Party that loudly and proudly approaches the matter from the right?
The membership certainly think so and want to finally put this to the test. A positive inflection is that this is what making the weather looks like.
The negative characterisation is that political parties do not succeed from their comfort zone. This is especially so when the shocks I have described above have been overlaid by a demographic trend where pressure on the state is really starting to bite. This is a structural trend that is deeply uncomfortable for Conservatives and they do not have an answer for it.
With Liz Truss the favourite to enter Downing Street in a few weeks’ time, we may be about to find out the answer. My instinct is that the Conservative Party’s complicated record makes the argument for a fifth term very difficult to land. The party’s most likely saving grace is another external shock that parks the argument back a few years further.