It is time for some brutal honesty. The Tories suffered their worst defeat since 1834 because they took their electors for fools, betrayed Britain and plunged our country into a vortex of decline. They broke their promises: where are the 40 new hospitals, lower taxes and reduced immigration? They squandered a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to reboot Britain after Brexit, sabotaging a historic political realignment, and selling millions of voters down the river.
They lost control of the machinery of government, gave up on growth, stranded millions on welfare, turned their back on the ownership society, taxed and regulated with abandon, shrugged off a baby-bust and rising anomie, and presided over miserable public services and a decrepit infrastructure. They refused to allocate land to housing out of fear of a backlash, and then were wiped out anyway, while ruining the dreams of a generation.
They blundered into an extreme version of net zero, and then declined to build the grid infrastructure and nuclear power stations required to prevent blackouts. They slashed the Armed Forces, failed to build enough prisons, imploded the courts system, decriminalised many property crimes and tolerated lax policing. They accepted radical gender ideology, including operations on children, until they were forced to bactrack by a few heroic feminists and ministers. They allowed critical race theory to run unchecked, leading to the persecution and cancellation of their own supporters and a generalised demonisation of conservative values.
They embraced manifesto-defying levels of immigration, but blocked the construction of the housing and infrastructure required to cope. They took the relative success of Britain’s integration model for granted, and allowed a catastrophic regression on extremism, Islamism, anti-Semitism and sectarianism. They sought to out-spend Labour on the NHS, but presided over a collapse in productivity, inhumane waiting lists and scandals. They memory-holed the historic disaster that were lockdowns, learning nothing from the lack of pandemic preparation or the disastrous inflation, debt and labour market implosion.
While the best Conservative ministers were men and women of integrity, too many of their colleagues governed as if politics were a game, a means to status; a significant minority of Tory MPs and advisers could have been members of Labour or the Lib Dems. The party promoted nonentities. The worst offenders combined staggering incompetence and breathtaking insouciance with barely believable levels of self-entitlement.
Some turned out to be insufferably snobby, privately dismissing their more principled activists or colleagues as “nutters”. These were often the same people who saw nothing amiss in waging war on core supporters, as with their assault on private cars or the imposition of crippling marginal tax rates on professionals, and would virtue-signal to retain invitations to dinner parties. Bizarrely, such Tories In Name Only also imagined that they retained a natural monopoly over Right-wing voters, and never took Nigel Farage seriously.
More generally, too few Tories engaged with deep ideas: with laudable exceptions, there was little interest in the great works of conservatism or classical liberalism, from Burke and Oakeshott to Hayek and Nozick, and abject levels of ignorance of economic theory, especially the pro-market thinking that inspired every successful recent centre-Right government worldwide. Many couldn’t give any kind of answer when asked what their favourite conservative book was, and one former cabinet minister even cited an HR manual as their inspiration.
Little wonder that they often spoke as Right-wingers but governed as social democrats. They deferred to Left-wing (but nominally “neutral”) apparatchiks such as Torsten Bell of the Resolution Foundation, Chris Stark of the Climate Change Committee or Sir Patrick Vallance, formerly chief scientific adviser. These three men are now, respectively: a Labour MP; the leader of Starmer’s clean energy taskforce; and a Labour minister. Mugs, anybody?
Margaret Thatcher was a conservative-classical liberal fusionist. William Buckley wrote that “a conservative is someone who stands athwart history, yelling Stop”; by that definition, the Tories, 2010-24 weren’t conservative. Milton Friedman defined a libertarian as somebody who believed that “a society that puts equality… ahead of freedom will end up with neither equality nor freedom”. By that definition, the Tories weren’t libertarians, either. So what were they?
Every Tory prime minister since 2010 shares in the blame. All are jointly responsible for the party’s lack of any legacy, apart from a de jure Brexit. Yet despite this unforgivable record, I still don’t detect any genuine remorse, any real contrition, any meaningful reflection, any realistic understanding of the scale of the apocalypse.
A necessary, but not sufficient, condition for a Tory rebirth is for the party to reunite the Right. It should be a broadish church, home to a range of opinions, but within narrower centre-Right parameters. There should no longer be room for those who believe in higher taxes, for advocates of extreme gender and woke ideology, for Rejoiners, for the soft on crime, for those too scared to confront Islamist extremism. The Tories must commit to much lower levels of immigration, and a gentler approach to decarbonisation. A small number of Tory MPs may not fit into this new, more coherent coalition: the sooner they leave the better.
Yet adding Conservative and Reform votes together wouldn’t have delivered victory. Many Tory sympathisers refused to vote, and others backed Leftist parties. Once they have consolidated their Right-flank with sounder policies, the Tories need to woo aspirational middle England, young and old alike, offering distinctive conservative solutions to the problems of interest to floating voters. They need to ooze competence, honesty and unity.
Three major changes are required. First, the Tories must embrace mass private house building, including new suburbs and towns. Second, they must prioritise growth in every part of the UK and higher GDP per capita: the Tories must learn to love capitalism, the City, small business and investors once again. Third, they need to offer better healthcare, inspired by a more European model.
The Tory party has failed the country, and hasn’t reached its electoral floor. It must change in every way, or die.
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