I wrote in the FT over the weekend about why the departure of Robert Jenrick has weakened the Conservative Party. But one reason I left out (I suppose because the offending piece hadn’t been written yet) was that it has encouraged the sort of analysis on display in the paper’s subsequent editorial:
“The Reform-lite approach that Jenrick championed and some other Tories favour is based on a misdiagnosis of why the Conservatives lost the last election so badly and have been reduced to a shrunken rump. They were not insufficiently right-wing; they were insufficiently competent.”
We have covered this ground before, but the idea that the Tories lost the last election on ‘competence’ is pseudo-analysis; superficially persuasive as long as you don’t think about it, but the moment you do the effect on an inquiring mind is akin to filling a watch with glue. There is simply no way to disentangle the question of ‘competence’ from the question of the Conservatives’ objectives and ideology.
For example, the party repeatedly promised the electorate that it would slash immigration, only to preside over enormous increases at the behest of various sectoral lobbies. Where was the incompetence: in breaking those promises, or making them? A case can be made for either, but which one you choose puts you on one side of the other of a substantive policy dispute. The same goes for every other area, most obviously tax and spending, where the Conservatives’ rhetoric and their record in office bore little relation to each other.
Such pseudo-analysis is favoured by what we might broadly call the Tory Left (and its sympathisers, which include both the FT and the Times, which published a very similar post-Jenrick editorial) because the alternative would be reckoning with the fact that they spent most of the 14 years the party was in power getting what they wanted. Public spending rose relentlessly (compassionate conservatism), taxes rose to support it (fiscal responsibility), and net immigration tripled (being-at-ease-with-modern-Britain). The tertiary education sector was inflated far beyond the point of usefulness; the prison estate was cut.
As Ivor Crewe and Anthony King once wrote of the Labour Right by the late Seventies, the Tory Left “have principles, and they have preferences, but they have no ideas”. Britain’s status quo is an utterly unsustainable trajectory in public spending, with all politics revolving around ways to keep the plates spinning just a little longer. Runaway house prices might have huge deleterious effects on the economy and the cost of living, but they do show up in GDP calculations; mass immigration hasn’t improved the economy on a per-capita basis, but it does generate the short-term savings and tax revenue needed to postpone change for another year.
There is no future in a return to an imagined 2010-2024 iteration of the Conservative Party, because the order for which it stood is running out of road. We know this because the Starmer Government, which barring a few exceptions such as education stands for exactly the same settlement, is speed-running the process of becoming the most unpopular government this country has known. A Conservative Party which took office in the same complacent spirit would suffer exactly the same fate, and deserve it.
Sadly, this complacency is being encouraged by the current leadership. In a column for the Daily Telegraph following her pre-emptive expulsion of Jenrick, Kemi Badenoch opened thus:
“Here’s the truth – the Conservatives have taken time to reflect after defeat. We have been honest about our mistakes. We have listened. There are now clear dividing lines with the other political parties. We choose conviction over cynicism, and hope over fear.”
This isn’t true. Badenoch fought the leadership with a vague top-line diagnosis of the general problem (“We talked right, but governed left”) and a promise that she would use her skills as an engineer to conduct a root-and-branch inquisition into the party’s failures in office once she won. Yet once she had won, the imperative of unity took over and that inquisition never happened; “we talked right, but governed left” is now supposed to stand as the sum of the reflection, not the starting point.
As a matter of tactics, this was a canny approach to the leadership contest. By not offering any answers, Badenoch made herself the candidate of everyone who didn’t have any, but knew that they didn’t like Jenrick’s. She was praised by grandees such as William Hague and, in the press, Daniel Finkelstein for eschewing any talk of policy to focus on the party’s ‘values’. But this consisted mostly of bromides about personal responsibility, lower taxes, and a smaller state which no Conservative minister from 2010 onwards has had any trouble saying; the problem time and again was actually governing in line with those principles.
Would next time be any different, on current evidence? There have been a few significant shifts, such as Badenoch’s commitment to quitting the ECHR (a Jenrick policy). But the party’s alleged commitment to fiscal responsibility doesn’t extend to revising the triple lock or means-testing the Winter Fuel Allowance; Priti Patel, who publicly demanded thanks for the Boriswave, remains in the Shadow Cabinet.
This isn’t entirely the Conservatives’ fault, any more than it is Labour’s. The ultimate problem is that the public is not obliged to think coherently about government, and is increasingly furious about the accumulated consequences of its own preferences. Unlike in 1979, or even 2010, there is no political space for a message about painful spending decisions, not least because our increasingly fractured party system keeps adding more potential defectors into the prisoner’s dilemma.
But dark and storm-wracked as all the potential horizons might appear, it doesn’t change the fact that the solid, sensible centre-ground of British politics is a graveyard, because the basic operating principle of sensible centrism is that the easy decision is generally the right decision – and if accumulated long-term consequences of those decisions are unpopular, it has no better answer than to insist that the critics “have to learn to like Britain again”.
The most dangerous thing for the Conservative Party about Jenrick’s departure is that it seems to have encouraged those who had no answer to his challenges in the belief that they don’t need them. Such an approach is unlikely to reap the electoral dividends they expect; but if it did, the only result would be to make Kemi Badenoch the next Sir Keir Starmer.