Anyone wanting to trace the decline of the Conservative Party would do well to start with 1979 and Margaret Thatcher’s first Cabinet.
The imperious new prime minister was surrounded by an array of talent, people of true stature with names such as William Whitelaw, Peter Carington, Peter Walker, Michael Heseltine, Geoffrey Howe and Quintin Hogg. Now, look at those who have been and gone from high office since Boris Johnson’s 2019 triumph.
Forty years in the making, the once great party was reduced to fielding characters who would never have made it to Mrs Thatcher’s side. From the leaders – Mr Johnson himself, devoid of attention to detail and honesty, Liz Truss, enough said, Rishi Sunak, a COO but no commanding CEO. From the supporting cast – Priti Patel, Gavin Williamson, Dominic Raab, Grant Shapps (a loser last night). This latter list is long and unimpressive.
For some time now, once the realisation dawned that Mr Johnson was an empty vessel, the Tories have lacked policies and substance. The impression they gave, increasingly, was of an organisation that would do anything to cling to power. It was as if the well-rehearsed accolade of the most successful electoral party in history anywhere clung to them like a faded, no longer fitting ball gown.
From the moment Mr Sunak stood in the pouring rain to announce the election, the outcome was foregone. Their campaign smacked of desperately treading water, just trying to keep afloat. Measures – remember National Service for all 18-year-olds – came and went, barely mentioned again. The sense of people who did not believe in what they were doing or saying, who were merely going through the motions, was compounded.
That was not the intention, of course. But this was a party that ran out of ideas and energy years ago.
They came up with grand-sounding phrases – “Big Society” under David Cameron, “levelling up” from Mr Johnson – but had no concept of how to put them into practice. It always was a difference between Conservative and Labour. The former is a party, the latter is a movement.
After each setback, Labour would dust itself down, pick itself up and begin again, more determined than ever to secure victory. The Tories never had that depth of motivation. For them it was all about winning, and winning. That was it. There was no vision, no ideological, detailed route-map towards a blue-tinted nirvana.
There was a time when the rump of the party, the “One Nation” Conservatives, provided sense and balance. Increasingly, though, they were marginalised. The Eurosceptics would not let up, and this small, vociferous group snapped and harried. They were aided and abetted by an outsider, Nigel Farage. The fear he spread was out of all proportion to his actual position. Nevertheless, it secured him the announcement of the Brexit referendum.
Still, his grip tightened. Look at the knots the government got into over Mr Farage’s claim to have been “debanked” by NatWest. It was a call from a minister that forced the departure of the chief executive, Alison Rose, from a bank that was majority-owned by the taxpayer.
Ms Rose did not need to go, Mr Farage wanted her gone, she went.
At the last annual conference, Mr Farage was courted, embarrassingly, by fawning Tory seniors. Roll forward to the election campaign, and Mr Farage’s declaration that he was standing for the Reform UK party was followed by awkward attempts by the same Tory leadership to put distance between them and a man whom they were wooing and pandering to only recently.
Suddenly, he was the enemy - more so, it appeared, than Labour leader Keir Starmer. This speaks volumes about a residual, gnawing fear.
Mr Farage had charisma where they had none, his Reform manifesto contained populist policies that would meet with Tory approval, he’d gone from being the maverick upstart to alternative rival.
So, it ended up with an enormous Labour majority, a landslide. Worse, if that was possible for the Tories, there is the arrival in the UK House of Commons of Reform.
The scale of defeat was not of wipeout proportions. Anything leaving the Tories with double-digit MPs would surely have signalled the end. Faced as well with resurgent Liberal Democrats, they would have been consigned to oblivion.
That has not occurred. Instead, they find themselves at a crossroads: to continue on the same, unhappy, uninspiring, unpopular path; or to change. The pressure will be for the latter. But do they return to the centre where they were once so dominant, or do they continue to shift to the right, to head off Reform, to take their ground? In which case, is there an argument for merger and the anointment of Mr Farage as leader?
It’s too early to call. Certainly, Mr Sunak should go and there needs to be a leadership campaign. But the need is more profound. They must decide who they are, what they believe in – and crucially they must stick to it (theirs has been a party of ill-discipline versus a much tighter Labour).
There is a strong, historical case for a move back towards centrism and the re-emergence of One Nation Toryism. But that’s not been the recent direction and the louder voices are on the right of the party. They will insist they were correct all along, that the rise of Reform proves it, that if the Tory party is to have a future it must embrace the values of the right.
The parliamentary candidates for leader from that quarter do not inspire. It’s hard to conceive of Suella Braverman or Kemi Badenoch appealing to the country at large.
There are two big beasts, one within the Commons but outside the party, and the other outside the Commons but within the party. They are Mr Farage and Mr Johnson. They are the same two who led the Brexit campaign. The fact the B-word is scarcely mentioned today will not hinder them.
A Conservative Party led by Mr Farage will not be the Conservative Party as we know it – Mrs Thatcher and her Cabinet would be lost for words. Equally, it’s hard to see how Mr Johnson can mount a credible return. He may point to his hero, Winston Churchill, who was ousted and did come back. Mr Johnson, though, is no Churchill – however much he believes he is.
What the Tories are facing is months – if not years – of soul-searching and arguing. They’ve brought it on themselves, and it will not end happily.
The scrapping begins today. But if it’s not accompanied by thought and clarity and rigour, they will surely be over – that decline will only carry on. The temptation will be to move quickly but a period of contemplation is required. Begin by revisiting that first Thatcher line-up and ask, how did we get from that to this?
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