Prosper UK, the new vehicle launched by Ruth Davidson and Andy Street to take the Conservative Party back to the centre-ground of politics, whatever you take that phrase to mean, has not been treated kindly by elements of the press. Juliet Samuel, in this morning’s Times, is gratuitously but enjoyably rude:
“Watching their promotional videos is like eating a Smint: you can just about tell what it’s trying to get at but as soon as the strangely disagreeable morsel is swallowed, you wish you hadn’t bothered.“
But the prize for the most concise and telling comment on the whole enterprise goes to @JCS_H94 (or ‘Joe’), who summed up the published list of its initial supporters as “Former UK”.
Now the Conservative ecosystem in the wake of the 2024 election consists mostly of ex-whatevers, so it might seem unfair to hold this against them. But there is something undeniably nostalgic about Prosper UK; a collection of old names, selling old nostrums. Not least of which is that damn saw about competence, which remains utterly without meaning once you think about it for a few seconds.
Few of the revenants rallying behind Prosper UK’s grave-linen standard need much explaining. The process of becoming a reactionary is quite natural, and requires only that the world moves, at some point, faster than you can accommodate. Most of Prosper UK’s supporters were backers or beneficiaries of David Cameron’s ‘modernisation’ efforts; they were, almost definitionally, the future. Now they’re not.
Not only does the new future arc, from their perspective, along most unpleasant trajectories, but tracing those trajectories back through the period leading up to them invites a critical re-evaluation of the revenants’ period in power which they, who define themselves so much by their competence, would not welcome. With past and future under threat, the instinct to retreat into the eternal present is understandable, if not pardonable. Somewhere, in some sunny place, it is always 2005.
The two leaders deserve more consideration. Both Davidson and Street are indisputably accomplished Conservative politicians; more impressively still, both made their names in territories which are not Tory heartlands (back when this distinction meant something). The challenge posed by their leadership of this movement deserves an answer.
But that answer is, I suspect, that there is simply very limited read-across from devolved politics to national. Politicians, pollsters, and journalists are all wont to latch onto a popular provincial figure and hold them up as an antidote to the failures of Westminster. Yet as the Conservative Party is now extremely well-qualified to testify, the stuff of a successful mayor and of a successful prime minister are not quite the same thing.
Devolved politicians are blessed with limited mandates. Even if they rail against them – and it is a rare devocrat who does not demand more powers at any given opportunity – they benefit enormously from not being ultimately responsible for this country’s biggest problem policy areas, or at least for most of them.
Andy Street, the one of the pair who has actually held executive office, did a good job running Birmingham. But that did not require him to balance runaway revenue expenditures and an ageing population against an historic tax burden, a more dangerous world, and a shrivelled defence budget.
Davidson is a more acute case in point; for all her undeniable talents as a campaigner, she never governed Scotland. Had she done so, she might have important first-hand experience of trying to deliver a smaller state and lower taxes when the voters want a bigger state (and lower taxes), but she didn’t. Instead, Davidson’s career was defined by two causes: the first to fight Murdo Fraser’s plan to break the Scottish Conservatives off from the national party, the second her tireless opposition to the SNP’s attempts to break up this country.
This is anything but a dishonourable record. If anything, Davidson gets points for the most ur-Tory motivation of them all: the steadfast defence of institutions she holds dear against their enemies. But the revival in the Scottish Conservatives’ fortunes under her leadership also owed much to a symbiotic relationship with the SNP; the more dangerous the latter seemed, the more potent the former’s pitch as the Unionist Alternative (to quote one of Davidson’s posters). Tellingly, when Nicola Sturgeon fought a Scottish election at the height of her powers, Davidson’s underwhelming successor managed to hold every last Tory seat at Holyrood.
If she wishes to defend the present order, that is Davidson’s prerogative. But the complacent, self-consciously moderate tone of Prosper UK is a stark contrast with the attitude which served her so well in the past. In defence of the Conservative and Unionist Party, and then the Union itself, she was aggressive to the point of pugilism and quite prepared to slaughter a sacred cow or two. “The time for sackcloth and ashes is over!”, indeed.
There is an interesting alternative timeline where Prosper UK – or rather a different, better vehicle reflecting that earlier character – took a similar approach. But had it done so, it could hardly have attracted the support of so many Formers. Their allegiance depends on an analysis which holds that everything would be fine were it not for a few things – Brexit and Truss, most commonly – for which they were not responsible.
Prosper UK is hardly alone in grappling with this problem. Kemi Badenoch faces a similar challenge vis-à-vis elements of the Shadow Cabinet, which is presumably why her promised inquisition into the Party’s failures in office concluded without having happened. More broadly, senior politicians and mandarins tend to filter out to become patrons at think tanks, or illustrious names at consultancies, where they bend those institutions to the laundering of their records; woe betide the junior researcher who concludes that a big-name Former in their organisation got something wrong.
But there is little value in a brains trust if its minds are embalmed in the tomb of the past, and Prosper UK is an armada against the current. The question before Britain today is not whether it needs a radical change, but what sort; anybody trying to get a hearing needs, if not a detailed set of prescriptions, then at least a coherent diagnosis of the problem, as well as the nerve to confront the numerous, extremely painful political trade-offs involved in any change of course. And to recognise that Brexit and Truss were both symptoms of the malaise, as much as causes.
Without that, Prosper UK’s insistence that it wants lower taxes, lower immigration, and a smaller state will continue to come off as merely the same ritual incantations that the Tories repeated, without apparent difficulty, from 2010 to 2024, as taxes, immigration, and public spending marched relentlessly upwards. They might well have been happier days, when the Party could win election after election saying words it didn’t mean. But they’re not coming back.