There are still, alas, several weeks remaining of this election campaign. But on the right, the blame game has already started. We staged quite the bout on these pages this morning: David Gauke in the red corner, Nigel Farage in the turquoise.
Within the party, this row will likely be at least suppressed, if not entirely silenced, until election day. Even if leadership hopefuls are making a nuisance of themselves behind the scenes, they will probably not want to run the risk that they are putting their ambitions above the campaign, not with party members still out trying, sometimes despite the politicians’ best efforts, to return Tory MPs.
But the bloodletting will come, and the outcome will shape the Conservative Party for a decade or more.
Most likely, the actual debate within the party will fall mostly between the two poles (it’s all the fault of the left/the right) limned by our contributors this morning. Yet for all that they have very different politics and almost polar-opposite diagnoses, there is a common theme in both cases for the prosecution: the gulf between word and deed. Here’s Farage:
“But the hard truth is that, after 14 years in government marked by many unfulfilled pledges and broken promises under four prime ministers, the Conservative Party is now a broken brand.”
And Gauke:
“Frost negotiated his Brexit deal; Priti Patel was Home Secretary in charge of immigration policy. If the policies pursued were not what the right wanted, perhaps responsibility lies here or even with their chosen prime minister.”
The chasm between Britain’s political debate and its actual politics is now so wide as to feel almost Baudrillardian. Jeremy Hunt and Rishi Sunak pose as tax-cutters whilst allowing stealth taxes to quietly carry the overall burden to historic highs; sentencing rules are toughened and fresh crackdowns promised even as a shortage of cells sees ministers letting inmates out early.
Both parties are guilty of it – and the more urgent the crisis, the more magical the thinking. Take housing: the Conservatives pretend (in a single paragraph, on page 52 of their manifesto) that they will embark on a Baron Hausmann-style total reconstruction of central London to help deliver 1.6 million homes in the next Parliament; Labour, meanwhile, touts pretty pictures from Create Streets of illegal houses they would almost certainly keep illegal.
Sir Keir Starmer’s failures, however, lie in the future. Our party’s are the world we live in. So if both sides agree on this disconnect between the Conservatives’ stated and revealed politics, the question the coming battle will really hinge on is why it has come about.
And on this, I haven’t seen much evidence from any quarter of a convincing answer yet. Consider again our two pugilists.
Farage doesn’t actually set out a case for why the Tories have failed so totally, as he claims. On the face of it, that’s reasonable: he is trying to compete with the Conservative Party, not treat it. Electorally, bald statements about the fact of the failure are enough.
Yet for any reader thinking about voting for Reform – and the majority of our panellists who would favour giving their leader the Tory whip were he returned to Parliament – the absence of any deeper analysis should give cause for concern.
It is, after all, very easy to say you’ll do things when there is no prospect of your actually having to do them. If Farage’s wake is not littered with failed initiatives and broken promises, that is in no small part because he has no experience of executive office. UKIP’s record in the European Parliament does not suggest that diligent engagement with the tedious reality of government is (yet) a hallmark of Faragist politics.
Even if you do think, as Gauke suggests, that the failures of the past few years are all down to “the Remainer establishment (the Civil Service, the OBR, the Bank of England, the judiciary etc)”, you still need a proper understanding of how they won, and how to beat them. Otherwise, a “voice of an opposition that will stand up to the Labour government” is all right-wing politics will amount to.
Which brings us to the counter-case:
“But the decline in competence and trust is inextricably linked to the move to the right. The Brexit Wars of 2016-19 resulted in a weak Cabinet that saw a commitment to the Brexit cause prioritised over ability. The Tories maintained the Leave campaign’s habit of promising the undeliverable.”
This, or variations on it, is becoming the official fairytale of the Tory left (or should I say, ‘liberal centre-right’). Everything was fine, and then Brexit happened, and then everything was terrible. If only that hadn’t happened.
Even on the face of it, this version of events feels a bit like saying that things were pretty comfortable aboard ship before it hit the rocks, and pretty miserable afterwards. It might be true, but it invites (and does not answer) the question of why the rocks were hit in the first place.
Was “promising the undeliverable” really a novel vice for the Brexiteers? It was David Cameron, after all, who stood for election in 2010 on a pledge to get net immigration down to the “tens of thousands”, and then did so again in 2015, when it was significantly higher. (“I think there’s room [in the Party] for people who care about immigration”, he says today.)
On Brexit, it was Cameron who promised to “get what Britain needs” in Brussels, and didn’t; he who promised to implement the British people’s decision in the referendum, and quit.
A liberal centre-rightist might fairly argue that this was simply a sensible man foolishly dabbling in the follies of the right, in an attempt to appease them. Can we indict the pre-2016 Conservative leadership on its own terms?
Yes we can.
Focusing on 2016 as an inflexion point flatters the architects of the world before it, because it suggests that all that’s wrong with Britain today is rooted in that one time they didn’t get their own way. But important as Brexit was, Britain’s relationship with the EU is not even close to the most important factor explaining its present, sorry state.
The UK’s GDP per capita (the actually important measure of how prosperous we are, not how many people we’ve added to the economy) has been flat since 2007, as have real wages. We were 20 years into the house-price crisis by 2016; average rents have risen every year, above inflation, since 1989.
The era of sensible government did nothing about the first two, and responded to the latter by pumping even more credit into a shortage and inventing a man-trap for young people’s savings.
Even as ministers insisted that importing more and more people a year was essential to sound economic stewardship, there was no adequate action on housing; and for all the touted focus on apprenticeships, the number of employers pleading shortages to get visa exemptions tripled between 2009 and 2019.
It goes on. We last built a reservoir in 1992, even though large parts of England now suffer (avoidable) drought in summer. The power to approve new reservoirs (under the Planning Act 2008) was in ministers’ hands throughout the Coalition. They didn’t use it, but Ken Clarke did shut a perfectly good prison (HMP Lancaster) because he’d wanted to in the 1990s.
Most damningly, Cameron and George Osborne did austerity terribly. Instead of making strategic choices, protecting key budgets by rolling back the state elsewhere, they tried to minimise political pain (and the need to make decisions) by salami-slicing every budget.
The result? What our columnist John Oxley dubs ‘Sh*t-State Toryism’. It’s as big as ever, but nothing works; the public spending obligations are less sustainable than ever, but the public’s appetite for cuts is gone.
You get the picture. The point is not that liberal Tories are necessarily wrong in their criticisms of the Tory right. They see its shortcomings with a fierce clarity, and many of their blows are telling.
But there is a “temptation to skip over” (to borrow a phrase) why they lost to such people: that the politics of being moderate and sensible too often devolves into the politics of the easy short-term decision and adds up, in the long run, to manifestly inadequate government.
The Tory left, no less than the Tory right, will not be fit for the battle ahead until it can face up to why it failed. It will be painful reckonings all round on July 5.