Even by the standards of the Conservative Party conference, there seemed an unusual number of young men living their best Sebastian Flyte. Maybe they had Brideshead in mind during these curious days as they laughed and drank and convulsed in the Hyatt Hotel. “Here, under the sway of a host of the past, all our recent exploits seemed remote and improbable…”
As the champagne flowed down the gullets of the Tory activists gathered in Birmingham – chipper, jolly, upbeat after the worst electoral defeat in their party’s history – there was an incongruity with what had been in July. In a competitive field, this was one of the weirdest Tory conferences of them all.
Labour spent a week in Liverpool far more depressed than it should have been; the Conservatives in Birmingham were far happier than they should have been. If anything, the Tories seemed buoyed, animated by the prospect of opposition, something articulated by Kemi Badenoch in her conference address when she remarked that “opposition can be exciting”. Part of it reflects the difference in the psychology of the two great parties: one a nervous wreck for much of its history, the other a largely unreflective election-winning machine. Some of it is schadenfreude, that after years of pious crowing, Labour has stumbled. But it’s as much because the party simply isn’t being honest with itself. It is in deep denial about not only how grave its electoral predicament is – with barely 20 per cent of the vote to its name – but also about how it got to this point.
This party has no theory of the recent past. There is nothing approaching an accepted narrative of defeat, as there was for Labour in 2019-20, and therefore a route out. They cannot even decide what to say about their nadir – the Truss debacle – much less apologise for it, or much else. Instead the queue to see the former PM spout her conspiratorial bromides stretched across the conference centre. Likewise, there is no agreement about how much contrition to accept for the wider, deeper failings of the state. There is obsession about immigration failures, but far less introspection about the appalling state of public services and the longest period of wage stagnation for 200 years.
But that’s because the Tories have so little to say about these things and therefore end up wallowing in comfortable ideological waters: the definition of a woman, “two-tier policing” and gags about Keir Starmer and glasses, without any recognition of the ethical questions posed by their long reign. Charitably, it shows a profound lack of self-awareness. Less charitably, there’s more than a hint of shamelessness about it all.
In so far as there is an explanation of failure, it is drawn from an impulse that has haunted Tory politics in recent years: the idea that the party simply hasn’t willed things hard enough. From Badenoch and Robert Jenrick in particular, there was endless discussion of how the party had lost its way and presided over a bigger state, without any consideration as to why this might be. The demands of an ageing society, a more precarious world and Brexit itself have all demanded more state, not less. But it’s easier to live in a fantasy world where George Osborne was a socialist all along. If you want an indication as to how shallow the party’s free-market principles are, consider that all four leadership candidates have excoriated Labour for means-testing winter fuel payments – virtually the first statist bung introduced by Gordon Brown.
But what of the theory of change, of the future? How to put right the wrongs? James Cleverly’s pitch is the simplest: the parliamentary party must unite and the Tories must stop “acting like children”. This suits a candidate who, of the main three, wants to do the least thinking. Jenrick believes that the Tories didn’t succeed because they didn’t follow through on their promises and convictions, and proposes to create a “New Conservative” party (which looks a lot like Nigel Farage’s Reform). Badenoch suggests that the Tories were barely in power in the first place – owing to the “legal architecture” of the Blair/Brown order – something for which she recommends a “deprogramming” of the British state. Tugendhat barely addresses the question, simply reminding us whenever possible that he was a soldier.
Cleverly is the party’s best bet. Of the four candidates, he easily deals most in realities and has a blokey, likeable presence. He is rightly suspicious of the Tories becoming even more doctrinaire, or indulging in the sometimes conspiratorial politics of Badenoch, suggesting the party might be better off being quiet, rather than noisy. In some respects he is the Starmer of this contest: an unthreatening candidate who could appeal if the government screws up (hardly an eccentric strategy given recent months).
But even for the likeable Cleverly, this parallel doesn’t quite hold. Because Starmer, from the beginning, was determined to show that he had changed his party and would move it closer to the electorate: “Country first, party second”. I’m not sure the Tories want to hear this because they think those things are one and the same.
One of the most ubiquitous themes at the conference was that the British public are conservatives deep down. No one from left to right seems to want to confront the hardest truth of all: what if they’re not? What if the public don’t want the Tories to be more like themselves but more like someone else?
Because the voters are not what the Conservatives think they are: they are much more statist and interventionist than they might ever like to admit. There is cultural conservatism but there is little interest in the online rabbit holes, conspiracy theories and culture wars now normalised within conservative politics. There are whole swathes of the younger and youngish electorate to whom the party seems to offer almost nothing. In their misunderstanding, a significant chunk of the Tory party now resembles the Labour left. They believe a winning electorate exists which is exactly like itself, if only it can be inspired, if only it can be willed.
Generously, one might say that this was always going to be an inward-facing conference, so soon after defeat. But until the Conservatives offer a realistic account of their past, and confront their own ghosts, they will not be a credible force to the outside world. And until they recognise the electorate is far from a mirror image of them, then both the Tories and the voters will be destined to disappoint each other.
[See also: What Scotland can learn from Andy Burnham]
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