This will be my last ToryDiary. It’s fair enough, really – one can only write so often about how the Conservative Party is barely in the newspapers before the question of how many full-time journalists are really needed to cover its remaining operations rears its head. Mutatis mutandis. So it goes.
One would hardly have imagined the party reaching its current pass back in 2013, when I first joined the team as Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland columnist after nagging Paul Goodman long enough. At that point, David Cameron was doing a fine job of smothering the Liberal Democrats and UKIP had not yet won the 2014 European elections.
Several shining Tory almost-hegemonies have come and gone since then. There was whatever Cameron was supposed to make of majority government in 2015, held up by some Remainers as a lost Hyperboria of tackling this country’s real problems. There was also the ‘Age of Osborne’, a term which seems to have been scrubbed from the internet. Then there was the imperial premiership of Theresa May, promised when she was leading Labour by 25 points in the polls. Then there was going to be a decade of Boris Johnson.
And yet, here we are. An existentially bad general election, followed by what must be at least a near-historic first in going backwards at the subsequent local elections (and not just backwards, but two-thirds-of-seats-defended backwards). Today, the party is geed up by a rally in the polls which, whilst real, still leave the party 2.5 points down on the general election and 6.5 down on when Kemi Badenoch became leader.
It all seems quite explicable in retrospect, as things usually do. The Tories failed for broadly the same reasons that Sir Keir Starmer is failing now, although the specifics are different. Ultimately, there was nothing resembling a proper governance project, and thus nothing to counteract the continual temptation to make the easy short-term decision and hope for the best.
Spending went up, planning applications were blocked, prisons were closed for economic reasons, and eventually we woke up in the future, which turned out to be populated not by the better, braver people to whom we had delegated the difficult decisions but by us, and the consequences of our actions. One is put in mind of this passage by Joan Didion:
“That was the year, my twenty-eighth, when I was discovering that not all of the promises would be kept, that some things are in fact irrevocable and that it had counted after all, every evasion and every procrastination, every mistake, every word, all of it.”
Sadly, the capacity of today’s leaders to evade this revelation far exceeds hers, and there remains too little evidence that the party has really grasped this problem. Badenoch has finally found her feet as leader and made some sensible policy interventions at conference, but on the big strategic questions the evidence is mostly bad. The Conservative Party remains committed to both the pensions triple lock and an un-means-tested Winter Fuel Allowance, two of the most obviously correct spending cuts of which it is possible to conceive. Meanwhile if the Tories actually have a housing policy, James Cleverly is being very quiet about it.
None of this is entirely the party’s fault. Our increasingly fragmented party system affords the electorate one refuge from reality after another; where once the consecutive failure of both the major parties of government might have created space for a radical break with the status quo, today there are always others – Reform UK, or the Greens – prepared to pretend that the country can be fixed by way of painless decisions and the targeting of baddies. The best that can be said of them is that, since Downing Street increasingly resembles a machine for destroying its occupant, if they take office by such means they will deserve it.
It may be that the generational gulf inside the Tory Party is insuperable. Broadly, this country can be divided into people who more or less had their adult lives set up before the crash, and those who did not. Many MPs sincerely believe that Britain is – or at least was, at some point in the recent past – basically fine. The politics of the easy decision worked for Tony Blair, and for Cameron, so it would surely work again, if only people were Sensible.
The mood amongst the party’s younger cohorts, such of them that remain, is quite different. Inside CCHQ, it seems increasingly black; even personnel who worked directly on Badenoch’s leadership campaign have started moving on to pastures more lucrative. But this group is not well represented on the green benches, and it is the balance of opinion in Parliament which is rightly decisive. It doesn’t matter how good your plan for the country might be if you don’t have a majority in the Commons who’ll vote for it. Ask Dominic Cummings.
But I have said all this before, and that is ultimately the point. There is nothing new in the Conservative crisis (if indeed something so long-established can be called a ‘crisis’) and one can only describe it so many times. There are other things to write about, or so I’m told. The Tories have delighted me – and perhaps I you, dear reader – long enough.
I will always be grateful, however, to have had the chance to grow so inured to such a fascinating subject – and particularly to the great Paul Goodman, formerly of this parish, who first took a chance on me as a budding journalist and then, in a remarkable display of self-belief, stuck by his decision through much early evidence that he might have been wrong. Nobody starting out in as tricky and fiercely competitive trade as journalism could have asked for a wiser or more patient editor, and I’m proud of what we built here together.
ConservativeHome will endure, of course, as it should; there are ravens in the tower yet, and good luck to them. This one, however, is off. If you wish to keep up with me, my Twitter is up there on the left. But for now, and as always, good morning.