The Conservative Party After Brexit: Turmoil and Transformation by Tim Bale
Tim Bale has attempted the difficult task of writing a history of the Conservative Party since June 2016.
How can one make such an account more than a digest of yesterday’s newspapers? The official papers remain closed.
When opened, those from Boris Johnson’s three years in Downing Street, 2019-22, will offer brilliant insights into his state of mind, and wonderful jibes at the official advice.
Some time ago I spoke to one of his aides who one day pointed out to him that his marginalia would in due course be published, a warning which seemed only to embolden the then Prime Minister.
Nor can a book like Bale’s be informed by interviews with all the main players. It is too soon for most of them to wish to speak. Rishi Sunak cannot yet be expected to place himself at the disposal of historians.
Bale rightly acknowledges the value of the Brexit Witness Archive compiled by UK in a Changing Europe, but does not appear to have spoken to many Conservatives himself.
No one can yet do for the four Conservative Prime Ministers in this period – Theresa May, Johnson, Liz Truss and Sunak – what Charles Moore has done for Margaret Thatcher: write an authoritative account founded on full access to the official papers and extensive interviews with all the main players, except for one or two who had died.
Moore stipulated that his first volume would not appear until after the death of Thatcher, which occurred in 2013, 17 years after he began his researches. The witnesses who spoke to him did not have to worry what she would make of their remarks.
And it was by then possible to view her with a degree of detachment. He includes a wonderful chapter on the hatred of Thatcher in metropolitan circles, which at its height exceeded the more recent hatred of Johnson.
As Ian McEwan wrote in a piece for The Guardian after her death, “it was never enough to dislike her. We liked disliking her.”
The same is true of Johnson. For some of his critics, hating Johnson produced not only a warm feeling of self-righteousness, but a comforting belief that British politics had become comprehensible: it had all been wrecked by the lies told by Johnson, Jacob Rees-Mogg and various other disgraceful figures.
Bale does not appear, on the evidence of this book, to hate Johnson, but he does despise both him and the Conservative Party:
“Of course, radical right-wing populist parties are about more than migration and, indeed, culture wars more generally. Typically, they also put a premium on charismatic leadership and, if in office, on the rights of the executive over other branches of government and any intermediate institutions. And this is exactly what we have seen from the Conservative Party since 2019, whether we are talking about what amounted (indeed, for some Tories, still amounts) to the cult of Boris Johnson or else the blatant attempts to sideline Parliament, pack its Upper House, rein in the judiciary, and reduce the independence of the Electoral Commission. Rishi Sunak never once expressed any concerns over any of this.”
One detects a certain dreariness of style, but according to Bale, Johnson gave “one of the most graceless resignation speeches ever made by a British Prime Minister”, followed by “yet another painfully self-pitying/self-aggrandising farewell speech” before leaving Downing Street.
The actual speeches are not quoted, so readers cannot decide for themselves whether they agree with these descriptions.
Critics of Johnson are inclined to arrive at a condition of such moral certainty that they consider it superfluous to read, let alone quote, his speeches.
In the unlikely event that anyone wishes to take the risk of seeing what this monster has had to say over the years, notably in speeches delivered before he became PM in which he explained his position on such questions as greed, equality and liberal cosmopolitanism, they will find extracts included in my recent volume about him, in which I contend he “could only moralise by pretending not to be a moralist”.
For Bale, Johnson is “a one-man moral minefield”. But he goes on to say that
“if the Conservatives post-Brexit really have slipped their moorings as a mainstream centre-right party, that need not mean they are doomed to go down to defeat – either in the short or the long term.”
Whyever not? But to this question, like many of the Conservative Party’s critics, he devotes little space, though according to him “we shouldn’t forget that many British people remain deeply uncomfortable with social change”.
Did the British people vote for Brexit, and at the general election of December 2019 for Johnson as Prime Minister of a Conservative administration, because they are too stupid to know when they are being lied to, because they themselves are bad, or because there are actually respectable arguments for Brexit as well as respectable arguments for staying in the EU?
Quite often, people may have voted Leave as the lesser of two evils, or in order to annoy a political class which had for many years taken them for granted.
But it is all too easy, when writing or speaking about politics, to adopt an omniscient tone, and forget Lord Salisbury’s observation after the Renfrew by-election of October 1877:
“One of the nuisances of the ballot is that when the oracle has spoken you never know what it means.”
Even after the votes have been counted and the result declared, an element of mystery remains.
One of the advantages of writing a history of recent events is that one ought, at least, to be able to give some flavour of the spirit of those times, unclouded by later developments.
The problem here is that Bale writes about the Conservative Party as an outsider. One does not feel he spends much time dining with Conservatives, let alone campaigning with them.
He often cites ConHome polls, which is of course a good thing to do, and even better he describes Paul Goodman, the editor of this site, as “always one of the most astute voices in Tory politics”.
William Hague, nowadays a columnist for The Times rather than a Cabinet minister, is likewise cited with approval.
But the journalists Bale approves of are more likely to write for The Guardian, where he describes Marina Hyde as “one of the country’s sharpest satirical columnists”, than for what he repeatedly calls “the party [i.e. the Conservative Party] in the media”: The Daily Mail, Telegraph and Express.
We get here a Guardian view of recent events. The country has been ruined because the Conservatives have been infected by a disreputable populism.
It’s a free country: people can be as rude as they like about the Conservatives, and there is a market for this stuff. Andrew Rawnsley, Chief Political Commentator of The Observer for the past 30 years, has hailed Bale as “one of the very best of our political historians”, “an expert, deft and fluent guide” who in this book shows how
“the Brexit virus has transformed the Tories from a mainstream party of the centre-right into an unstable amalgam of radical rightwing populists, hyper-libertarians and market fundamentalists.”
There is another way of looking at things, which Bale, to do him justice, hints at as he brings his book to a close with an unexpected quotation from Enoch Powell:
“There is one thing you can be sure of with the Conservative Party, before anything else – they have a grand sense of where the votes are.”
Bale introduces Powell as “perhaps the ultimate neoliberal populist”. Here is a clue: populism, as he calls it, is not such a new phenomenon in the Conservative Party as for most of his book he has implied.
The party has succeeded so well for so long because it has never shrunk from popular innovation. At any point from Sir Robert Peel onwards, one often finds it condemned, both by its opponents on the other side of the Commons, and by its own backwoodsmen, for dangerous departures from the true path of steady, unadventurous conservatism.
The party wins by working out what the nation needs, and providing it more quickly than its Labour or Liberal rivals are able to do.
To both its supporters and its rivals, such fickleness seems unprincipled. How can the same party at different times favour protection and free trade; appeasing Hitler and standing up to him; spending cuts and Keynesianism; building council houses and selling them off; going into Europe and coming out?
The odd thing about Bale and his Guardian friends is that they cannot understand movement. Though they think of themselves as progressive, they are in many ways deeply reactionary, and cannot bear any change which they themselves have not adopted first and duly certified as progressive.
Johnson (who by the way entirely overshadows the other three leaders in this book) does understand movement. He saw, as any sensible person should, that Europe can be argued both ways, but he himself chose the bolder option, the reassertion of national sovereignty, and promised it would be a great success.
He saw too, as any sensible person should, that many towns in the Midlands and the North have been shamefully neglected, and promised through local leadership to revive them.
He saw at once that the Vaccine Task Force offered an escape from Covid, and promised his unwavering support.
And he saw early on that Putin was going to launch an attack on Ukraine, and promised to do everything he could to support the Ukrainians in their struggle for freedom and national sovereignty.
How much these promises were worth, neither he nor anyone else could know. But by getting Brexit done, he had done more to save the credibility of Parliament, and of the political class, than any of his moaning, stick-in-the-mud critics would have been able to do.
Quite soon the Conservative Party, sensitive as ever to public opinion, decided Johnson, like so many of its leaders before him, had outlived his usefulness.
Great was the rejoicing at his downfall. Every prig in the land hailed it as a morality tale, with virtue at last triumphant.
But one suspects that Johnson, like Disraeli before him, will always divide opinion, and that the verdict of history a hundred years from now will not be quite so uncharitable.