Thursday saw the death of three types of Conservatism.
The first was elegiac. Peter Hitchens has been set free. He warned us long ago that the Conservatives weren’t really conservative. We spent the last fourteen years proving him right. Over at UnHerd, Hitchens suggests it died “because there is no call for it anymore”. Having “missed the last train of the old life”, he has watched the admirable but forgetten England he knew pass away.
The lesson of this? All the wars that were won and lost somehow don’t seem to matter very much anymore.
The second was liberal. Not in the narrow sense of One Nation MPs losing their seats, to the hollow delight of some. I mean a liberal assumption: that Britain is a happy outlier, where multiculturalism works, a hard right is absent, and politics is peaceful and tolerant. Not so after Thursday. Sectarianism is here to stay, the child of high immigration and low integration. Welcome to the new politics.
The lesson of this? Britain is becoming a lot more French, and to place a bet on Keir Starmer losing his seat in 2029.
The final was unserious. As Henry Hill has said, the “one thread that unites all the governments…we have had over the past fourteen years…is postponing difficult decisions and taking the easy way out”. Tory MPs have enjoyed self-indulgent squabbling and showing leg to the court journalists than governing. We bless Labour with a vile inheritance – a Britain palpably in decline.
The lesson of this? That this defeat was deserved. We deserve 24 per cent of the vote, and 121 MPs. We deserve to hand Labour a landslide on only 34 per cent, to be mopped up by the Liberal Democrats, and to have Reform rend asunder a coalition we had just stitched together. Things can only get worse, but we made them pretty awful ourselves. The electorate – je vous ai compris!
Where do we go from here? A rancorous orgy of finger-pointing and blame-shifting. Whatever the length of the coming leadership election, we can already sketch out its basic contours. Were we too left-wing or too right-wing? What should be done about Reform? Or the Lib Dems? Should we smash the glass marked Boris Johnson? Who still has Tim Shipman’s number?
As the usual suspects squabble over who picks the crown up out of the gutter, Labour will have months in which to establish the narrative overhanging the next five years. Britain is even more broken than they’d feared. More surgery and lower expectations are required. Best of luck: we need a bold government, of whatever stripe, to build homes, power stations, and high-speed railways.
I hope that Labour succeed. I want to live in a country with 2 per cent growth, where my friends and I can comfortably settle down, and where politics is something that doesn’t have to be watched from behind the sofa. If Starmer delivers that, he’ll will have more than earnt another landslide in 2029. Heck, he might even deserve my vote, as he finishes the job half-completed this time.
But if I wasn’t a pessimist, I wouldn’t be a Tory. A government headed by Sue Gray, Ollie Robbins, and a late middle-aged man with a bespoke piece of legislation outlining his pension will not radically change Britain. Earnest in its rhetoric, it will double down on the failed post-1997 model: stakeholderism, mass migration, energy scarcity, and a constricted economy with a bloated state.
It will do that in the face of serious demographic and international headwinds. There is an unfortunate assumption amongst some left-wingers that all of Britain’s problems since 2010 have solely been down to the effing Tories being in power. Just replace us, and the milk and honey will flow. Record waiting lists must be due to Conservative incompetence, not the surge in Brits aged over 70.
Of course, there are lots of things wrong with Britain that are our fault. We lost control of immigration, missed our housebuilding targets, and failed to build necessary national infrastructure. Lockdowns wiped out our successes in education, welfare, and the national debt. We hobbled our armed forces. We got Brexit done, but for what? Nothing much has changed. Did it matter?
Yet even amid the tergiversations, we discovered that governing is very difficult in a turbulent world, in a country with profound structural problems, and where the political-media-civil service class is frightened by the backlash triggered by difficult choices. Even if the real government is now emerging form behind the curtain, those dynamics remains the same. Are Labour cooked?
A landslide of 170 based on the support of a third of the voters who could bother to turn out is a difficult base for unpopular action. The number of marginal constituencies is at its highest since the war. Even before Beijing starts eyeing up Taipei’s semiconductors, Starmer has the potential to become even more unpopular long before 2029. To our utter shame, he is eminently beatable.
That is especially the case if Labour fails as spectacularly in delivering for their voters as we did after 2019. But this also means the next government will still inherit a Britain with profound, long-standing, and worsening problems. We turn to St Francis of Assisi. As with Margaret Thatcher’s victory in 1979, the sad truth is that things will get worse before they can get better.
That is the central insight of us Tory Leninists: the right’s young Bolsheviks hoping to wrestle Britain out of its enervating decline. Brexit, Covid, Ukraine: each an opportunity to shake us out of complacency, and each fluffed by the Conservatives. We want growth, low migration, building, and energy abundance. In the spirit of Russia’s premier revolutionary, we ask: what is to be done?
Opinions differ as to whether Dominic Cummings is a uniquely effective political operator, or a talented self-mythologiser outwitted by a patron of the Conservative Animal Welfare Foundation. Either way, a teenage addiction to his blog pointed me towards John Hoskyns, Stepping Stones, and the need for a future government to understand Britain’s inter-related challenges.
Various attempts have been made to draw up a contemporary Stepping Stones. As with the recent proliferation of initiatives plotting the future of conservatism, they have suffered from a very Cummings combination of people, ideas, and machines. Different tribes with different outlooks in different organisations have been talking at cross-purposes, to little collective benefit.
Rishi Sunak could do no greater service in his remaining time as party leader as to commission a respected and experienced party figure to produce an independent report into the party’s defeat, and where the Conservatives should go next. But that only serves as a precursor to the more difficult task of returning to power. How can we prepare to win and govern effectively in 2029?
Behind the inter-tribal disputes, an honest consensus of the party’s failings is emerging. As Neil O’Brien and Robert Jenrick have written, our problem was one of competency, not ideology. We promised to control migration, cut NHS waiting lists, and make voters better off. We failed on all three counts and were punished accordingly. This sits above babble of turning to left or right.
As after 1997, our central task is to repair this reputation and position ourselves to benefit from Labour’s collapse. We should not be making plans for Nigel. We won 121 seats and 24 per cent of the vote. Reform won 5 and 15 per cent. A challenges, yes. But this was not Canada 1993. To hostage our party to Reform’s motley crew of TV hacks and golf club bores would be absurd.
Voters across the Red and Blue Walls are quite similar. As hated as we are, the 2019 coalition can be reunited around a revolution. In true Leninist style, that requires a purge of personnel. CCHQ is not fit for purpose and should be replaced. Richard Holden may have clung on by 20 votes, but he will not go down well in the annals of party history. Lord Woolton, where are you now?
Our focus should be outwards: on renewing Britain’s elite, in the spirit of Civic Future and the Centre for Policy Studies, attracting talented individuals into politics. Britain can do better than the lobbyists, NGO workers, and twelve-year-olds now populating Starmer’s majority. The aim should be to select candidates within two years. Use the methods of the Lib Dems against them.
All of this is plenty for the next leader to be getting on with. ConservativeHome will have far, far more to say in the coming weeks and months. As bleak as Thursday’s result was, it has provided a moment of clarity. Opposition is awful, but our goal is clear. If we have learnt anything from the last fourteen years, it is to stop looking inwards, understand what Britain needs, and deliver it.
The vanguard is preparing. The burning questions of our movement are ready to be answered. Nothing is written.