At the heart of Tom Tugendhat’s article in this morning’s Daily Telegraph kicking off his bid to be leader of the Conservative Party is a rather bold claim:
“Some people think the Conservative leadership election will be divisive, splitting the party. That’s wrong because actually, there’s a long list of things this election isn’t about. The ECHR. Gender. Tax rates. Defence spending. Net zero.”
Why is it not about these things? Because everyone in the Party already agree on them, apparently:
“We know that if institutions do not serve the British people and make it harder to control our own borders, then we will have to exempt ourselves from them, or leave their jurisdiction. We know what a woman is. We all want lower taxes. We all know national security must come before Treasury spreadsheets. We all know that energy security and household bills come first.
“These are common-sense Conservative positions. They are non-negotiable for me and, I would hope, for anyone else who puts themselves forward.”
It’s an interesting bit of framing – the No True Scotsman fallacy deployed as a generous gesture. Tom is absolutely certain that anyone standing in this contest will be a true Conservative, as he is, and would surely be dismayed and surprised should any prove him wrong.
It also speaks to the big challenge facing his candidacy: tackling the perception that he is a Wet.
Tugendhat is reportedly well-supported amongst the MPs, not least because most of Penny Mordaunt’s supporters have rowed in behind him. But he and his advisers know that the best the parliamentary party can do is put him in the final two – and that the traditional role of the One Nation candidate in the membership round is losing to the candidate of the Right.
His supporters point out that Tom’s actual voting record is much sounder (to use the Tory parlance) than his public image might lead people to expect, and that’s true. I have written before that people who try to frame this context as a simple binary between moving rightwards or towards the centre are missing a more complex and interesting picture, and the Shadow Security Minister is part of it.
There is certainly a case to be made that combining a centrist vibe with a more reliably right-wing policy agenda is exactly what the Party needs after several years of doing the opposite (and managing to alienate most of the electorate in the process). But it will be an uphill struggle for Tugendhat and his supporters to convince others that he is in fact as reliably conservative as Kemi Badenoch or Robert Jenrick, the two right-wingers who seem most likely to be his opponent if he reaches the final round.
Because whilst it’s easy to say that “we all want lower taxes” and “know national security must come before Treasury spreadsheets”, our recent experience in government strongly suggests this is not the case – or at least, that merely wanting and knowing things is not a sufficient condition for actually doing them.
In office, we raised taxes, whilst exploiting the freezing of income tax thresholds to pretend we were cutting them. April’s big defence spending announcement was similarly an exercise in book-cooking, with the Government’s big headline ‘increase’ relying on projections which would otherwise have seen the United Kingdom breach its commitment to NATO.
The basic problem is this: project Britain’s core public spending commitments forwards for a couple of decades, and the picture is horrifying. Yet there is no public appetite for the sort of radical programme which might put the country on a different track; nor, unlike in 1970s, has the Right developed a coherent programme to offer them.
In the face of this, ministers lapse into Treasury autopilot: a Stakhanovite approach to families and retirees to try to boost nominal GDP, mass immigration to supply corvée labour to unreformed public services and suppress the wage bill, etc. Compound that with an entirely unserious approach to housing and infrastructure (HS2 will end up reducing inter-city rail capacity by 17 per cent), and you have a recipe for the disaster unfolding around us.
Yesterday, William Atkinson posed to James Cleverly the killer question: “What does Cleverly’s Britain look like? Where is the country going wrong, and what must change?”
We shall ask the same of every candidate, and today is Tugendhat’s turn. It is understandable for candidates to want to focus on delivery and paper over any ideological dissension; nobody wants a repeat of the public bloodletting that marked the 2022 contest. But such an approach has two obvious shortcomings.
First, there are genuine ideological differences within the Conservative and Unionist Party (there hardly could not be, given that it is a big-tent party). Second, both of its main ideological poles are badly out of date, rooted in the vanished conditions of 2005 or 1975, rather than 2025.
John Oxley is right this morning to urge members to focus on finding a candidate with the skills needed for Opposition, rather than simply setting ideological purity tests. That does not mean, however, that ideas can be ignored altogether. We need to press the candidates on policy, and not just on whether we like individual proposals but whether or not their proposals cohere into a clear-eyed programme for government.
Without that, it seems very likely that even if the Party does return to office in five years, as Tugendhat insists is possible, it will turn out like the last time – except that Labour will have wasted another five years and Britain will be even deeper in the mire.
There is no way to actually cut taxes, for example, or redirect public spending to defence, without making substantial cuts to public spending in unprotected areas. Pretending otherwise, as we have seen, results only in ‘Sh*t-State Toryism’ and lying about tax cuts.
Nor is there any more space for trying to find easy routes out of the housing crisis. In his Telegraph pitch, Tom writes: “Our planning system must allow cities to grow upwards, not outwards, becoming more beautiful and more productive.” Yes, the Tories should have been much more aggressive about unlocking housebuilding in London, a fact the previous Government grasped only far too late.
But let’s be clear: a strategy focused solely on letting cities “grow upwards” is one that will deliver only flats, not the family home with a garden to which many voters aspire, and demand for which is a big driver in the cost-of-housing crisis. Letting Tory MPs pander to their worst instincts on Green Belt development is easy short-term politics, but a disservice to the nation – and will do nothing to win younger generations back to the Conservative fold.
Britain’s problems cannot be fixed inside either party’s comfort zone – nor, for that matter, inside the electorate’s current preferences. Yet whilst the voters tend to reward parties that tell them what they want to hear, it remains their prerogative to punish them for the results, as they did on 4 July. Facing up to that unenviable challenge is the difference between regaining office and deserving it.