The Long Death Of A Shortsighted Party
Forget the election — the Tories have been in decline for years
Theresa May was utterly awful. Her prissy self-assurance belied the incompetence of an over-promoted civil servant from the Home Office. Her misguided and dictatorial leadership, combined with a terrible election campaign, were undoubtedly significant reasons for the catastrophic loss.
However, the uncomfortable truth for the Tories is that they are in slow decline. The last time they secured a commanding majority was under Margaret Thatcher in 1987. During the era of New Labour’s dominance, they were feeble and since then they have underperformed in the last three elections (2010, 2015 and 2017).
In 2010, Cameron failed to secure a majority against the uncharismatic Gordon Brown, whose party was suffering from third-term fatigue and had the misfortune of being in office during the financial crisis. In 2015, Cameron won the slimmest of majorities against the appalling Ed Miliband, whose amusing recent tweets make you forget how poor he was. And then, in 2017, May shuffled the Tories off the edge of a ravine.
Though each election must be assessed on its individual merits (or lack thereof), it is clear that something more than May’s leadership cost the Tories votes. This something is the party’s right wing, designed and engineered by the 1922 Committee. Regardless of how centrist a Tory leader tries to be, this faction keeps the party in nasty territory and in a state of civil war over Europe.
Theresa May’s newly appointed chief of staff, Gavin Barwell, recognised this when he cited austerity and Brexit as the issues that cost Tories the election. Austerity is nasty and Europe is divisive.
Barwell is right. The Tory right has long seen the determination of Britain’s relationship with Europe as its domain and, following the referendum, the right moved to cast Brexit in its own image. The 48 percent who voted to remain, along with any leave voters who sincerely believed they could have their butty and eat it too, were disregarded. Further, no attempt was made to secure the buy-in of business. The 60 percent of the Tory party that voted to remain was frozen out and the notion of cross-party input was rejected out of hand.
May and the Tories should have recognised that the mandate for leaving the EU was slender and sought a departure that reflected this. Instead, the likes of Davis, Rees-Mogg, and Duncan Smith helped her to reach a hard Brexit stance, predicated on a myopic and laughably quaint worldview, which overestimates the UK’s power and influence. In July 2016, there was hope that Theresa May would find a swift and reasonable accord with Angela Merkel but this seemed very distant by June 2017, when May was making infantile and unstatesmanlike promises to be a ‘bloody difficult’ woman.
Having been persuaded of the virtues of a hard Brexit, May opportunistically called an election, with the aim of crushing Labour and securing a towering personal mandate.
The public rejected her.
Concerns over Brexit, a surge in Euro-friendly young voters, seven years of austerity, and May’s personality deficit resulted in what is surely the most humiliating election result in British party history. The only Conservative who appeared to enjoy the result was George Osborne.
The problem now facing the Tories is that three decades of electoral under-performance look set to be compounded by their total ownership of Brexit. If it is anything but a complete success, they will be punished. Given the economic illiteracy of a hard and fast Brexit, this was always a daunting assignment, but the state of Britain’s public services makes it near impossible. The spiraling costs of an ageing population, education, medical advances, and so on mean that any economic blip will be keenly felt. The Tories with their ‘nasty’ reputation, association with spending cuts, and obsession with a hard Brexit will be obliterated if there is any further decline in living standards and public services.
Demographic changes are not helpful to the Tories either. Writing in the Daily Mail, Michael Heseltine recently observed that the party loses about 2 percent of its support each year to what I shall politely term demographic attrition. These voters are being replaced by non-Europhobic millennials, saddled with university debt and an inflated housing market. They are not drawn to the Tory party in the clutches of its right wing.
To their credit, the Tories have shown astonishing longevity through the centuries. A testament to this is that Robert Peel rebranded the party as the Conservatives in 1834, a full 12 years before he masterminded the repeal of the Corn Laws in 1846.
But one wonders whether now is the time for moderates to ditch the albatross of the hard right that hangs around the party’s neck. A small group of mostly white, privileged, and out-of-touch men have a disproportionate say in Britain’s government. Their desire to divorce the continent could be the catalyst that sees the party finally break.
In an increasingly complex, complicated, and dangerous world, Britain can’t alone guarantee its own security and prosperity. Tory moderates understand — as well as that a rupture would enable a sensible group of politicians to enter the currently vacant centre ground, where they would be free to try and forge a future that accounts for the UK’s desire to remain autonomous but without the jingoistic hubris that characterises the hard right.
This is surely a more appealing option than watching the 1922 Committee continue to attempt to forge Britain in its own image.
James Ignotus is based in London.
