The Tory party has sunk so low it will soon be submerged

Rishi Sunak thinks he'll survive by pitting voters against each other. He's wrong

The Conservative and Unionist party, the greatest electoral vessel in history, is listing, holed below the water line. Mutiny is in the air. The rudder is unresponsive. The skipper is rearranging deck chairs in a last-gasp effort to convey a sense of normality and forward movement.

It won’t work. HMS Tory is stuck in the shallows. The ship is taking water and the passengers are taking to the lifeboats. Come the next general election someone other than Prime Minister Rishi Sunak will probably be needed to head up a salvage operation.

Eight years of chaos, infighting, regicide, malfeasance and delirium has left the Tory party drained and badly in need of a wholesale refit.  Once a mighty flagship of free enterprise and intermittently generous patrician values, the Tory party is now little more than a soap box for populists.

The story of a post-Sunak, post-May, post-Johnson and post-Truss Tory party has yet to be written. What we can say with a fair degree of certainty is that it will be very different from what has gone before.

It’s worth reflecting on the party’s long march since becoming the dominant political force in the land to see how far it has moved from its guiding principles and how low it has fallen.

Britain’s post-war Tory party was dominated by the likes of Harold MacMillan, Ian Macleod and Rab Butler, men who sympathised with Benjamin Disraeli’s one-nation conservatism. Disraeli understood the need for a narrative the whole nation could share. It favoured enterprise but emphasized inclusivity and social reform.

I recall being drawn to Supermac in my school days. I liked his essential decency. I identified with his belief that the rights of the individual should not stand above his duty to his fellow man. I admired the way he led Britain out of empire and into a closer relationship with Europe.

The arrival of Margaret Thatcher in 1979 brought the curtain down on the post-war consensus. She once described consensus as ‘the process of abandoning all beliefs, principles, values and policies’. This is the language of reason abandoned not principle.

Privatisation, her assault on trade union power, the Big Bang and her signature ‘right to buy’ housing policy changed Britain forever. Love her or hate her Thatcher was enormously consequential both in Britain and on the world stage.  But she was also profoundly divisive. Her rule signalled the start of a long period of rising inequality and a growing wealth gap.

'“ For today’s Tories problems are there to be exploited not solved”

David Gauke

Today’s Tories in comparison are super lightweights. Possessing neither the sensibilities of one-nation conservatism nor the intellectual heft of the Iron Lady, they resemble nothing more than a grander version of the now deceased United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP) whose erstwhile leader Nigel Farage is about to be welcomed back into the fold.

Concerns over sovereignty, the unequal fruits of globalisation and nationalism begat Brexit which in turn begat today’s inward-looking, ultra-nationalist Tory party.

Faced with electoral oblivion Number 10 has opted to plant its flag firmly where its base is most susceptible to identity politics. Black and blue from Brexit and its aftermath, Covid and falling living standards voters are, once again, being goaded into taking sides, into forming up as opposing tribes.

But voters – that’s you, me and our neighbours – are complex, multi-faceted sometimes contradictory beings. We are, all of us, capable of holding several thoughts at once. We don’t always make sense and the world doesn’t always make sense to us.

How we feel about our country and our countrymen often depends on whether we can put down our megaphones and get to know each other over a pint.

But that doesn’t work for the practitioners of wedge politics. They are betting the farm on objectifying the electorate as motorists, benefit scroungers, immigrants or ‘hard-working people.’

The big guns of the Tory election machine are being trained on hunting the political equivalent of Big Foot – Woke Man. The target is so broad, the canvas so big, the charge so vague that you can class virtually anyone as an enemy. Common decency, compassion, mutual respect become weaknesses to be despised.

David Gauke, banished former Lord Chancellor and one-nation Tory, puts it neatly: “ For today’s Tories problems are there to be exploited not solved”.

Suella Braverman the Home Secretary, whose leadership campaign gathers speed by the hour, is the leading exponent of this dark art. Her increasingly strident misanthropy are little masterpieces of innuendo and doom-laden non sequiturs.  In one short statement she tars the ‘ luxury of liberalism’, the coming ‘hurricane of illegal immigrants’ and habitual criminals with the same brush.

With similar hyperbole Business Secretary Kemi Badenoch asserted that we can’t ‘bankrupt ourselves to reach net zero”. Ministers are being sent out to criticise Labour policies that don’t exist. Badenoch adds for good measure with breathtaking arrogance: “ We are the government. We should mark our own homework.”

I may be wrong but my hunch is that the Aussie-advised Tory high command is barking up the wrong tree. The fevered and obviously carefully co-ordinated attack on ‘woke’ values in the NHS, 20mph speed limits and mythical 15-minute cities are of less concern to voters than the daily struggle to make ends meet.

Women in particular are unlikely to be drawn to this kind of full-metal-jacket politics. Sewage-free rivers and the gender pay gap are more likely to influence which box they tick in the ballot box.

Sunak has staked a lot on rowing back on Britain’s commitment to net zero. This too is likely to put voters off especially in wealthier constituencies in the south. Delaying the 2030 ban on diesel and petrol cars by five years isn’t a sea change in itself. It’s the mood music that goes with it. Chopping and changing Britain’s net zero targets infuriates businesses like the Ford motor company that depend on stability to make huge investment decisions.

Sunak is throwing everything at what politicos like to describe as a ‘reset’ of his premiership: introducing draconian smoking laws; pleasing petrolheads by pushing back against speed limits; replacing A-levels with a French-style baccalaureate; banning mobile phones in schools; keeping trans men out of women’s hospital wards; truncating HS2.

I have no idea whether Sunak thinks he can pull the party back from the brink or whether this is displacement activity. But Sunak leads a party that lives in one world while the rest of the country worries about how much their mortgage will cost when their contract runs out.

Disraeli, the novelist, describing Britain in the 1850s in his novel Sybil wrote: “Two nations; between whom there is no intercourse and no sympathy; who are as ignorant of each other’s habits, thoughts, and feelings, as if they were dwellers in different zones, or inhabitants of different planets”.

That was then. But it’s also now.