The Conservative Party is politically and intellectually exhausted. It has not won a stable parliamentary majority since 1987 and has proved incapable of delivering Brexit, a project of its own creation. In the European Parliament elections, the Conservatives won their lowest share of the vote (8.8 per cent) in any nationwide contest since the party’s foundation. But more than this, the “majestic pragmatism” that once defined British conservatism has been replaced by a dogmatic commitment to neoliberal economics and to Brexit at any cost.
The party’s leadership contest has exemplified its intellectual torpor, characterised as it is by talk of a no deal Brexit, the prorogation of parliament and further uncosted tax cuts for high earners and corporations. Boris Johnson, a dishonest charlatan indulged by a supine press, has emerged as the front-runner despite his disastrous tenure as foreign secretary. Indeed, as Jason Cowley writes on page seven, one can now speak of the “know-nothing right” (as the former New Statesman editor Paul Johnson did of the “know-nothing left” in the 1970s) – a party and movement that proudly brandishes its ignorance and prejudice.
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