The Conservatives aren't interested in winning the next election 🥱
The Conservatives aren't interested in winning the next election 🥱
The party just isn't serious about winning. Yet.
‘People will do anything, no matter how absurd, to avoid facing their own souls.’ - Carl Jung
Confronting the terror of a denied truth is one of the most human, soulful and rewarding things a person can do. Naturally, human beings therefore spend a great deal of time and effort avoiding it at all costs, no matter how depleting, difficult, or even debilitating, the paths taken to avoid it can become.
Telos
What is the purpose of a political party but to advocate for its ideologies and implement them, in the hope of governing and reforming its constituency and its denizens for the better?
On the surface this is self-evident, but political parties serve many more purposes to their members that can come into conflict with this higher purpose. We also use political parties as social and psychological comfort blankets to validate and reinforce our preconceived worldviews, and soothe our anxieties about the complexity of society, politics and existence. My team good, your team bad.
Political parties are conformal structures in which individuals can find shared identity, personal development and friendship – this is true at the parliamentary level, and even more true at the local activist and councillor level, where politics is inherently less ideological, and more practical.
Parties are philosophical, systemising and theoretical institutions in principle, but deeply social institutions in practice – wearing the resultant contradictions and imperfections heavily upon their shoulders.
It is the secondary, functional purpose of political parties that so confuses them into diverging from the primary longings of their soul, thereby losing the privilege of their raison d’être – to govern and create the best conditions for constituents and communities to thrive.
Focusing too much on the functional turns politicians into transactional tacticians and caseworkers, rather than strategic leaders that are prepared to weather political turbulence for a delayed, higher purpose.
An excessive focus on tactics can pull strategy away from the desires of the political soul without a party even noticing it – parties can become blinded by their cognitive conviction over what, why, how, and who they are, even as their existence screams of tortured disconnection.
Mandate
One of the most skilled political operators in recent political memory must be Michael Portillo. After famously losing his Enfield North seat to Labour’s Stephen Twigg in the 1997 election ‘Portillo moment’, you might imagine that seeing his dreams of party leadership dissolve would be a great personal wrench.
Reliving the experience in 2015, Portillo spoke of the opposite: ‘The fact that I didn't have to run for the Conservative leadership, the fact that I wasn't going to be part of this rump of 165 Tory members who were clearly going to have a miserable time, at least for five years, if not for 10 or 15 years. You know – all of that was actually quite a relief.’
Having lost by such a severe margin, it was already clear to Portillo that the recovery of the parliamentary Conservative party would take a very long time. A defeat of such magnitude would require the party to undergo a severe and distressing challenge to its identity. Being the leader of a party embarking on such a painful journey is a thankless and difficult role that offers few rewards – and rarely the reward politicians consider most precious – power.
After he re-entered the commons in 1999 at the Kensington and Chelsea by-election, and despite his relief at missing out on the party leadership after the ‘97 election defeat, Portillo still had plenty of political ambition left in the tank. He quickly assumed the second most senior post in Her Majesty’s Loyal Opposition – the position of Shadow Chancellor, under William Hague.
All the better vantage point from which to launch a leadership bid, when the inevitable drubbing occurred at the next general election – and so it did, 2001 delivering a near-perfect facsimile of the 1997 landslide. After Hague stepped down, Portillo announced his candidacy in the leadership contest early on, convinced that it would be a coronation.
Following two identical and overwhelming landslide defeats in a row, and with a pervasive sense that the party was simply not comfortable with modern Britain, his case for reform and modernisation was surely unassailable.
Not so, said the parliamentary party, which instead favoured a bunfight over Conservatives’ future direction – leaving the sole declared candidate standing like a soldier in no-man’s land: shot at from all sides.
After two weeks of relentless negative briefings from colleagues, and subsequently having made almost no progress in accumulating more votes than his initial 49 in the multiple parliamentary rounds of the leadership election, the will to fight on for the leadership ebbed from Portillo as the contest went on.
He said: ‘[By this point] I didn't much want [the leadership]. I did have this big idea about what I wanted to do with the Conservative Party, which was to move it to the centre ground. In order to do that, I thought I would need a huge majority.
‘I would need an absolutely whopping mandate to do that. From quite early on, as this 50 votes was never added to, it was clear to me that I was never going to have a whopping mandate. And to try to do what I wanted to do without a whopping mandate seemed to me very unattractive.’
Once again, Portillo spoke of relief of having been freed from the constraints of an unenthusiastic, unclear mandate with little room to claim an endorsement for his vision of the party’s future: ‘So actually, when I didn't get it, I was relieved, because I was never anywhere near getting the mandate.’
If the parliamentary party was disinterested in his vision for modernisation, that was nothing compared to party members, who under reforms that Hague had introduced, now had a voice. They were given a direct say on the final two MPs put forward by the parliamentary party.
The parliamentary votes in the third and final round before candidates were put before the membership was nearly equally split between Portillo, Ian Duncan Smith and Kenneth Clarke – offering a resounding and powerful parliamentary endorsement to absolutely nobody. And while Clarke won a slim plurality of the MPs votes in the final round of party membership votes, he went on to lose to Duncan Smith, who won a convincing margin of 60:40.
What is even worse than an unenthusiastic and unclear parliamentary party mandate? A conflicted one. The party membership had just eagerly endorsed a candidate who had only been voted for by a third of his fellow parliamentarians, and – perhaps more importantly – had not been endorsed, or was even actively opposed, by the remaining two thirds. The rest is predictable history, with Duncan Smith lasting only two unremarkable years as party leader before being replaced.
In voting for Duncan Smith - the candidate of the party’s right – at a time when elections were being won from the centre by a landslide, the party membership declared to the electorate that the party was not sufficiently serious about winning. ‘I will not come to the electorate, the electorate must come to me.’
Next
Because the failings of the last Conservative government were so vast and varied, there is plenty for the current crop of leadership candidates to lament and lambast without great cost to political identity. You don’t need to have a wider position on the structure of Britain’s political economy to say that governments should uphold ethical standards and avoid blowing up bond markets.
Few outside of the populist right of the party are happy to defend the moral standards of the party leadership under Boris Johnson, even if they might be happy to welcome him back in spite of his ethical failings in government. Even fewer are willing to defend the chaotic, short-lived Liz Truss government, or the lacklustre, rudderless captainship of Rishi Sunak.
Leadership hopeful Tom Tugendhat said that the party must ‘rediscover moral leadership’, while James Cleverly said ‘our division and behaviour obscured the victories and compounded the mistakes.’ These are easy positions to take.
That is not to say that these positions are incorrect, or that the party does not need to work on these areas. It absolutely must. But these are besoothing bromides. Stating these things does not require a structural understanding of Britain’s economic and wage stagnation, and how this is having knock on impacts in living standards, intergenerational inequality and the quality and availability of public services.
Distracted first by Brexit, and then by Covid, the party simply did not sit up and pay attention to the structural economic failings piling up under its tenure in government. The party of free enterprise, growth and aspiration had not seen real wages increase for two decades – while it was in power – and it didn’t even notice!
It never examined the extend to which it had become an elderly welfare party, and how placating the NIMBYism of its increasingly retired voter based tied into economic stagnation and overspend in public services and infrastructure. It didn’t notice how the most basic unit of conservatism – the family – was being suppressed by passively allowing homeownership for young families become a distant, bitter dream.
It did not foresee that indulging every preference of pensioner voters was a cursed choice, as the selfsame demographic came to expect the NHS to work for them. And to do so after a decade of low capital investment, while they retired into the long term health management needs of their generational autumn.
It had quite simply become a functional political party, devoid of ideology. Its direction resembled that of Woolworths or Blockbuster – one of managed decline, not driven and hungry innovation. Its purpose was to listen to its voters and membership, and give them exactly what they wanted, regardless of the long-term consequences. The party’s function had diverged from its identity, and in doing so, its identity had diverged from its soul.
The chaos and impropriety are downstream of the party’s ideological failings. Without a flag to rally around, politics becomes an individual, rather than team, sport. Victories are no longer strategic and collective, they are tactical, and singular. When letting down colleagues is normalised, letting go of ethical standards is easier.
Unpicking the threads of failures of the last government would require the leadership victor to claim a mandate – an overwhelming mandate given by both parliamentarians and members to truly challenge the party on its failings – to tear off the comfort blankets and confront it with the cold truth of what must be done.
What must be done not just to win power again – but to how to wield it to once again raise wages, improve living standards, and support public expectations of the state. None of the candidates has said the unsayable thus far.
And without saying the unsayable to the party, none of the candidates can truly claim a mandate for change, even if they win. Without a mandate for change, how can the party be forced to change, and thereby recover? I said in UnHerd recently:
At first, it will be too offensive to declare that the party can no longer rely on offering pork-barrel goodies to a dwindling set of grey voters. But challenging the status quo of a pensioners’ welfare and planning system that hands out cash to retirees, and prevents the building of infrastructure and new homes, is vital. Not facing up to these realities has led the party to catastrophic defeat in any case, yet it’s unlikely to give a mandate to change this order without the maturity that comes through serial defeat.
To his credit, Jenrick has publicly and emphatically endorsed Ben Southwood, Samuel Hughes and Sam Bowman’s exceptional and must-read Foundations essay on the structural reasons behind Britain’s stagnation.
But this is still far from explicitly telling the party the uncomfortable truths it must face to break free of the stagnation. That there will actually need to be pylons and new homes in not just someone’s back yard – but your backyard.
That redistributing the incomes of the young towards the wealthy elderly has practical and moral limits. That taking away winter fuel payments from millionaires is fine, actually.
Perhaps this is as far as Jenrick feels he can go for now. Ask Theresa May – her frank honesty about the need for social care to be partially funded by the wealth tied up in personal estates was swiftly rewarded – by lifelong socialist Jeremy Corbyn robustly attacking her proposed wealth tax, and the unravelling of her anticipated 2017 election landslide.
Telling voters truths they are not prepared to hear is rarely the route to electoral success. But the party membership is not the same as the wider electorate, with whom the party just lost. In order to win again, it will be necessary to stop indulging, and start disappointing the party membership selectorate.
Just as the Labour Party came to realise after 2019 – after nearly a decade out of power – ideological indulgence comes at the price of your opponents winning. Again. And again. And again. Until you make peace with, and act on, the lesson the electorate are trying to communicate to you.
The remaining Conservative Party membership is now comprised of the distilled essence of the demographic the party must challenge – and disappoint – to win back power. This will make the task much, much harder.
The parliamentary party votes are currently, reminiscent of 2001, relatively evenly split: 27.7%, 23.5%, 17.6% and17.6%. None have yet mapped out the way forward convincingly. Maybe this will change at party conference, as the media cycle shortens and narratives set alight.
But even if the parliamentary party coalesces around a particular candidate. Even if that particular candidate champions reform, and maps out the path back to victory. Are the rank-and-file members be ready to challenge themselves? See you at the next leadership election.