UK

The natural party of government? After five PMs in seven years, the Conservatives seem all at sea

Geoffrey Wheatcroft
Thu, 24 August 2023 


Late one night in 1867, Benjamin Disraeli, chancellor of the exchequer in Lord Derby’s Tory government, cunningly thwarted a Liberal wrecking amendment in the Commons to his second reform bill. Having written to Queen Victoria at 2am, he went to the Carlton Club, where he was cheered and toasted as “the man who rode the race, who took the time, who kept the time, and who did the trick”. The following year he became prime minister.

Much the same words may have been used in the small hours of 13 December 2019, when Boris Johnson pranced about Conservative central office in London, pumping his fists in the air as his adoring staff and colleagues embraced him. In the less than five months he had been Tory leader and prime minister, Johnson had purged his parliamentary party of some of its best and most honourable people, had precipitated a general election by dubious and possibly unlawful means, had then fought the election on a promise to “Get Brexit done” – and had won the Tories’ largest parliamentary majority for more than 30 years. Here was another leader who had ridden the race and done the trick.

And there the comparison ends. After defeat by William Gladstone and the Liberals at the 1868 election, the Tories returned with a crushing victory in 1874. Disraeli spent six more years at No 10, ending his days as the Earl of Beaconsfield and Knight of the Garter, adored by Victoria, ruefully admired by Bismarck, and with the Primrose League founded in his memory.

Within three months of his own election triumph, Johnson was faced with the pandemic crisis – which he was totally unequipped to deal with – and by the summer of 2022 he had been ejected by his own party, to be replaced by Liz Truss, in an even more absurd and even shorter-lived tenure. In Randolph Churchill’s phrase, Disraeli’s career saw “failure, failure, failure, partial success, renewed failure, ultimate and complete triumph”. Johnson has known enough ups and downs himself, but today, less than four years after his victorious election, his career has ended in ultimate and complete failure, for himself – and maybe for the Tories.

If the fall of Thatcher, or the way it was done, poisoned the party for years, the recent poison was inflicted by the cynicism behind the rise of Johnson. As Dominic Lawson, an intelligent Brexiter, has said, “Boris Johnson was never in favour of Brexit, until he found it necessary to further his ambition to become Conservative leader.” Since the Tories knew that, their relationship with him was always transactional. He was useful for a time, but he was dumped as soon as he became more liability than asset. And yet the Tories are suffering from “long Boris”, a grievous affliction that could still prove terminal.

If Rishi Sunak was meant to offer calm and efficiency after mountebankery and pandemonium, it hasn’t worked. A technocrat isn’t what is needed at present, and the skills Sunak presumably showed while making money as a banker are different from those a political leader requires. He looks more and more “in office but not in power”, unable to cope with everything from the small boats crisis to inflation and low productivity. And one effect of the Tories’ destructive civil wars has been to leave Sunak with one of the most unimpressive cabinets in living memory.

After a torrent of scandals and a string of byelection defeats, this August finds polls in which the Tories are looking at a wipeout in next year’s election. Eighteen years ago I published a book called The Strange Death of Tory England, and was later mocked in the rightwing press when the Tories staged a revival. But maybe that title was only premature.

Modern European political history has seen few things more remarkable than the Conservative party. There has been something called a Tory party in England for 350 years. Its name originally came (with a certain historical irony) from the Irish Gaelic tóraí for an outlaw, thence a Royalist rebel against Cromwell’s murderous oppression, thence again a supporter of the Stuart crown and the Church of England. After the “glorious revolution” had deposed James II in 1688 and the Hanoverians arrived in 1714, the Tories went into internal exile. As AJP Taylor asked, “What sense had ‘church and king’ in an age of latitudinarian bishops and German princes?”

But the Tories had begun to show their remarkable capacity for shapeshifting and chameleon adaptation. By the second half of the 18th century they were in power, by the early decades of the 19th century they were for a time a party of reaction. And yet they soon began to illustrate Bismarck’s dictum about English politics: that progressive administrations take office to pass reactionary measures and reactionary administrations take power to pass progressive measures, notably in the Tory case Catholic emancipation in 1829 and the Second Reform Act in 1867.

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A vein of sheer obscurantism could always be found, from Lord Eldon, early in the 19th century, saying that all change was change for the worse, including change for the better, to Lord Salisbury later in the century with his maxim: “Whatever happens will be for the worse, and therefore it is in our interest that as little should happen as possible.”

And yet the Tories refashioned themselves over and again, as a party of patriotism and public welfare, particularly in the 1920s, when Neville Chamberlain laid the foundations for so much of that social security we now take for granted. In the 1950s Rab Butler said that “the Conservatives have never believed in laissez-faire”, and in the 1980s Margaret Thatcher did her best to contradict him. In all, by continually adapting themselves to changing times, the Tories have held office alone or in one form of coalition or another for 90 out of the last 150 years, always displaying a ruthless hunger for power.

Now something has gone wrong, or gone missing. In 2002 Theresa May told the party conference they were in danger of becoming “the nasty party”, but this was a misunderstanding. They have always been that, and as Lee “fuck off back to France” Anderson shows, they still are. But nobody ever voted for the Tories because they were “nice”. Their success was founded not on amiability but on competence, and that’s what has been destroyed by the farcical recent turbulence, with five prime ministers in the past seven years.

For a century and a half the Tories had a plausible claim to be “the natural party of government”. Today, they barely look capable of governing at all. Forty years ago Thatcher brimmed with ideas, some of them right and some of them demonstrably wrong, but the Tories now have no idea at all. They have run out of time, run out of excuses – and maybe run out of purpose.

Geoffrey Wheatcroft is a journalist and the author of The Strange Death of Tory England. He is writing a further book about the Tories’ recent turmoil and implosion