I have a confession to make: I am a Conservative party entryist. True, I have voted for the Tories most of my adult life so it is my natural political home but I never joined, not even when once I was a candidate for the local council elections (a no-hope candidacy in Oxford, a city that has elected just one Tory councillor since the 1980s).
My reason for staying aloof was that as a working journalist I thought I shouldn’t compromise my independence by joining any party, but last autumn I took the plunge and signed up. I did so because, as everyone knew, there was a leadership contest coming; and now it is upon us and there is hard thinking to be done.
No one seems to have a good word for the way the Tories are conducting the contest; it is variously described as un-democratic (because only party members get a vote), too private (only Tory MPs are hearing the arguments from the candidates) and too sprawling (because there are too many candidates). On top of all this, it is said, those who will get a vote – the 124,000 Tory party members – are hopelessly unrepresentative of the country at large, being too old, too male and too white. Furthermore, it is claimed, the party has in recent months been infiltrated by hordes of mad Ukipper entryists intent upon inflicting the hardest of hard Brexits on the country.
On this last point, at least, I can exonerate myself. At the referendum I was undecided even at the point of entering the polling station but then, in what I thought of as a “head over heart” decision, I voted to Remain. I would not do so again; the Brexit negotiations have been a steep learning curve for anyone who harboured fond illusions about the true nature of the EU.
The assertion endlessly repeated by Remainers that “people did not know what they voted for” is an argument that cuts both ways. Those of us who voted Remain were just as much in the dark about what that meant for the future as were Leavers. The one great benefit I see having come from the referendum is that it has helped clarify the realities of national life: like sunlight at a low angle that suddenly brings the landscape into high relief, Brexit has brought definition.
We now know, for instance, that Parliament – Lords and Commons both – are overwhelmingly Remainers and have acted on their beliefs. Mrs May’s tragic deficiency of basic political skills combined with the Establishment’s Remain bias has created the current impasse. It has also illuminated a fundamental division between those – like George Osborne and Michael Heseltine – who think the whole issue is about economics (“Britain plc”) and those who believe that the core argument is about democracy itself.
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