The Conservative Party is recovering slowly from Liz Truss’s farcical premiership and its poll ratings have improved. Since entering Downing Street six months ago, Rishi Sunak has done enough to cast doubt on the general assumption that the Tories were heading for a landslide defeat at the next general election. Labour’s poll lead, which previously averaged 20 points, has fallen to as low as 11, while Mr Sunak’s approval ratings have even exceeded those of Keir Starmer. The Prime Minister has confounded those who predicted that his would be a zombie premiership. He defied his recalcitrant backbenchers to achieve a Brexit deal for Northern Ireland, he has outflanked Labour by announcing a £4bn expansion of free childcare, and he and Jeremy Hunt, the Chancellor, are sober and serious in their approach. What the Prime Minister has not done is resolve his party’s ideological tensions and contradictions.
Rather than waiting for the Conservatives to return to opposition, MPs are already competing to define the party’s purpose and shape its future. Ms Truss and her acolytes still herald tax cuts and deregulation as a panacea for the British economy. They are deluded. Others in the party, meanwhile, champion what they are calling “national conservatism”. This is a more pessimistic, authoritarian, explicitly Christian and anti-woke world-view, closer in spirit to some of the national populist movements in Europe than to neoliberalism.
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