Have they really changed? Credit: Oli Scarff/AFP/Getty
Manchester, the grinding Victorian gothic horror city, with its dirty pedigree of iron and smoke, is grim no longer. The shells of gargoyled halls, warehouses, and station sheds house four-star hotels, sub-Shoreditch bars, and brochure-baiting convention centres. The sounds are all power-drilling and concrete smashing. Resurrection and destruction are the same.
The Tories were here, last week, for Conference, at the height of their uncannily revived powers.
Priti and Michael, Rishi and Nadine, were spreading their wide wings in Manchester Central, the singed remnant of some 19th century NASDAQ, now a corporate events space. The place was choking with Conservative slogans and branding, and boosterisms; but were they anything more than fresh enamel licked on the same old Westminster banger?
I was here because I wanted to watch the political body get pressed by conspiring lobbyists and cringing public affairs officers. I wanted to understand the people who will rule over us for the next decade. Had they really become the “people’s party”? Were they really more Northern, more working class, more in touch with basic realities? Did “levelling up” Britain mean anything at all? And did they really know what to do with that sweet majority, with all that delicious power?
If they were the people’s party, then it was ostensibly for people like Greg. I found him palely loitering around the exhibits one morning in a three-piece tweed suit. Both he and the suit appeared new. “Personally,” Greg said, “I’m nineteen.” He was from Harlow, Essex. (The 20th most deprived area in England.) His mother was a teaching assistant. His father was a drug dealer. He had never been to one of these before.
Conservatism gave him an identity. A way of defining himself contrarily. He said he’d hated school. Hated his Left-wing teachers. Hated, he admitted, his Left-wing home. He was utterly sincere. The new Conservatism had offered him enough to make the journey to Manchester. There were probably more Gregs in the party than there had been for a generation.
Did the Gregs have a champion? It was supposed to be Michael Gove. But the Minister for Levelling Up had pitched his tent so large that he was lost in it. Gove’s levelling up agenda was too wide, too vague. What did it mean to say that he wanted to “ensure people live their best life”? Promising everything would be another way of doing nothing.
But at least Gove sounded cheerful. All of them did. “Now”, Rishi Sunak posted on Instagram, “is the time to show them that our plan will deliver.” In their speeches and their digital branding the ministers rolled together many different optimisms. To be a ranking member of this government was to be present with vigour and joyfulness.
Let the other side talk about fuel shortages. Let Dom talk about trolleys. Let the Telegraph spit about taxes. After Covid, after Brexit, it was time for peace. It was the moment to say, as Nadine Dorries did — against all sense, all reason, and all justice — that No Time to Die was the “best Bond ever”. None of it needed to be true.
The only statesman-in-embryo for miles around Manchester was the Tees Valley Mayor Ben Houchen. A plausibly blue-collar, municipal Tory, reminiscent of Joe Chamberlain in the specificity of his vision, and in the way he embodied a sense of place.
He talked poetically and pointedly in a flat, steady Geordie voice at a fringe event one evening. Now was the time, he said; the Conservatives could rebuild and restore the North. He described a radiant future, where green tech brought the industrial revolution full circle, back to Teesside, back to Newcastle, Darlington, Stockton. Houchen’s revolution went backwards to reclaim the future. The superabundance, the rewarded greed, the hard materialism, and the worldly ambition of mid-19th century England would be born again. History could be forced. You had to push against it. Ben Houchen was doing this in Tees Valley. He had cajoled and eked away until industrial jobs were returned to Hartlepool and Redcar. But this time the revolution would not be iron squealing on iron, it would not turn country boys into broken factory hands, or pollute the rivers, or poison the sky black. These industries would be green, pure.
I was taken along by him, briefly. But he was only a mayor.
I met other Gregs. Four late teenage, working-class Tories from — rub your eyes — Liverpool. Owen Jones buzzed around them with a microphone, his mouth slack, bewildered, bitter. (The four did not make it into Jones’ “behind the scenes” conference video report.) Oh we hate him, we hate him, we hate him, the four boys said as they approached Jones. “But still,” one whispered, “we must get a selfie with him.” I asked them who their favourite Prime Minister was.
“Thatcher,” one said, “Thatcher forever.”
It stunned: Thatcher still burned above Conservative politics, charging her imitators with warmth and light. What else could explain Liz Truss? The new Foreign Secretary dressed like Thatcher, snubbed and blunted enemies like Thatcher, and started, whenever I watched her speak, to look like Thatcher too. Truss’s events were the most queued for. The members were pilgrims shuffling towards a splinter of the true Eighties cross. Truss offered them sacraments of fiscal rigour, delivered with leathery personal firmness. For in the pits of their hearts, the members didn’t want a big, caring, doing state — where levelling up was purportedly taking them. They didn’t want to go there. They certainly didn’t want to pay for it either. What they wanted was a dominatrix to lovingly roast the Government’s flab off with a blowtorch.
These were the Tories who went, like Truss, longest into the night, after the daytime, orderly, brisk conference had been washed aside by the 6pm tide of expensed alcohol and gossip.
This conference happened in padded back rooms, invite-only suite parties, and long carpeted ballrooms in the bowels of the hotel. It was stranger, and darker, than the day was. Every night there was a sense of homecoming: after the election, which was never properly celebrated by the party; after the lockdowns, which made so many of them unhappy and uneasy.
The bar fizzed. Boys younger than tadpoles dragged their seats near to enthroned junior ministers; howlingly drunk princes screamed for the right kind of bread; dazed spads slid off chairs; rumours were exchanged: sexual escapades, job promotions, if Carrie was even allowed in her husband’s suite, more sexual escapades, and whether the Prime Minister will use his big speech to raise the minimum wage. (He will not.) And at every table, a suit lapel stuck with ironic lake blue badges that said “Tory Scum”.
A few knew how weird it was to be the “people’s party.” “I’d rather be the party of the working man than the party of the rich,” one of the princes had roared. “But I still want to be very well off.”
Would all those pristine first-time Conservative voters like what they saw at this conference, if they’d been here? They would have liked Houchen, maybe even voted for him. They would have put some chicken nuggets in the oven for Greg. Perhaps they would have spotted Liz Truss’s talons. Would they have noticed where real power in the party lay? Trollope writes somewhere that people who take an interest in politics should “not be desirous of peeping behind the scenes”. They wouldn’t like what they discovered.
At the top of the party was what a bad columnist would call the liberal metropolitan elite. The enduring sentimental stereotype of Toryism in England is utterly misleading. It’s still the rah-rah, port-sinking, organ music playing, red melton fabric, Oxbridge, Brideshead, “young fogey”. They are extinct. Kaputt. That Boris plays this character sometimes leads to confusion. The Left think they are fighting Simon Heffer, when they’re actually fighting Henry Newman.
The leading factions in the party are as distant from people in Redcar as the Blairites became. For now they are simply better at patting voters on the head than the Left is. Conservative power is wielded by spads who look like they were laying over in Manchester before a flight to LAX. An explosion in a Hugo Boss factory clothed them all in the same tieless blue suit. And the women strode by in dresses high in the neck and long to the floor. Headbands were mandatory. They are photocopies of Carrie.
Together the blue suits and the headbands formed a court, which squatted in government. They were the fluffers and pot-holders, the heralds and jugglers, the princes and flunkeys. Observing them did not make me feel confident about the power they had bedded so luxuriantly down in. The court only knew messaging and campaigning. Nobody knew how to govern. Not in the Labour Party either. “We’re not run by anybody,” Rory Stewart said in 2014. “The secret of modern Britain is there is no power anywhere.”
But the Prime Minister still had power, of a sort. The other ministers gave their speeches in a squashed auditorium. He had a pharaonic hall to give the culminating barnstormer in. A big venue for the big boy.
It didn’t matter what he said. Nothing could move this government until the Labour Party woke up. Their power was a given. He could stand there and announce bread rationing next week and go up in the polls. They’d build a statue of him in Parliament Square. Everyone knew he had ten years by default. All that was required of him was a presence, to keep plates spinning in the air, to offer up punchlines.
Maybe though, after effete Boris, after this era of frothy giggling and wily manoeuvring, the party and the country would grow weary of clowns and sharpers. However ingenious they were at game-playing. Then Houchen — or a figure like him — might have a chance.
This is what the country needed. It is not what the party craves.
Ultimately the theme of conference was not whether the the Tories were changing. It was the glitter of this easy, empty power. The good ideas the Conservatives had, and all the good they could do, were at risk of being washed away by it.
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SubscribeI find myself often thinking wistfully of Margaret when seeing how the present ministers are dealing with the country. At least she believed in Britain and its future more than her personal ambitions or ‘optics’.
A good writer, great imagery, fun characters, witty, satirical, irony and lurid analogy… it had it all for British Political opinion/journalism writing, but maybe too much of it, and I ended up wishing for more kind of – just telling the story story, the ‘Who, What, When, Where & Why’ and a bunch of well chosen quotes to cover the landscape of the thing and attendees.
But good essay writing of the classic British kind.
Agreed. I too was struck by the vivid prose and general quality of the writing. The author does touch on an important point, though. The progressives hold most of the institutional power in the UK (and US). Will Boris use his strong hold on political power to counter them or will he just throw bread and wine to the masses for the next several years?
Boris is on a short leash held by the very progressive Princess N N. The way all these Politicos today are seemingly are caught up in some 50’s British Sex Farce, very much being lead around by their parts rather than their desire for good governance, makes me wonder if they have not all been captured by the Post-Modernist Progressives – the same, but reversed genders, as how the Australian one has been.
It is like a very dark Benny Hill episode.
Continuing Galeti’s comedy analogy – the caricatures displayed here are straight from an 80’s Harry Enfield sketch, with a special guest appearance from Rik Mayall playing journalist Will Lloyd who has his nose press up against the window and is screaming “Fatcha! Burn the witch!”
I genuinely don’t know if Will’s piece is a parody or not. The only bit I related to as on point was the excellent Rory Stewart quote. Let me assume he’s serious. Across Europe, we see Political hearts and minds being won on the centre-right and the Green/far left. Boris is shameless in that we will nick ideas from both, whilst dropping same people/initiatives like a hot brick once either becomes unpopular.
Remember, whilst Boris has been running this non-event of a conference, the more extreme elements of the Green manifesto are crashing all over the world. Biggest growth in employment opportunities since the days of “Fatcha!” and the Labour movement can find little to talk about other than who may or may not have a cervix, whilst Blairites chunter on about a democratic vote that happened 5 years ago and whether Boris deserves to have a holiday or not.
Boris doesn’t have to respond or do much at all really – which of course is his most happy of happy spaces. He’s even nicking Trump’s tactics. Knowing the press openly dislike him, he can toss them a different ball twice a day and watch them wear themselves out furiously chasing them round and round.
He stands for everything and nothing; yes, he is the ultimate chancer and chameleon. But frankly, so is Starmer. He doesn’t even control his Deputy Leader, let alone the wider party. The only way he can get elected is by getting into bed with Nationalists, who despise the rest of the UK. By that time he’ll be riding so many horses in different directions that his legs will resemble a Tex Avery cartoon.
It’s no good wishing for a reunion of the guys in that first Blair band either. Those that remain need to get themselves some flash Green gear, get the old Momentum badges out and make their way back to the centre ground that way. Compared to that lot Boris is looking like David Bowie to the voters. Anyway, Steve Bray is awaiting instructions from Millbank’s Burnley headquarters, so good luck and all that.
He may be a fool but he’s their fool Will, and there’s a lot of them who are inclined to vote. Give them a reason to vote for something better, rather than just a reason to hate him personally, and we’ll all start to get to a better place.
You are absolutely correct. The Tory Party is strong as long as it promotes woke ideas. So, as I have said many times, the Labour Party is actually stronger in opposition than it would be in power.
In Oppositionland there is no Covid, no shortage of truck drivers and the everything looks rosy. Even the woke ideas are taught in schools so that the next generation will be brainwashed. The embarrassing Marxist extremists have no power in Oppositionland so they can be safely ignored as well.
I simply don’t understand this. The Tories are strong as long as they promote woke ideas?! Come again?! They are strong, insofar as they are, because they oppose (though often ineffectually), woke ideas, which the more ordinary people hear about, the less they like: ‘white privilege’, putting ‘trans rights above biology etc. The Tories can be pretty useless as long as much of the population realises that its opinions and culture are actively disdained by the Left. The Labour Party has been particularly good at this from Gordon Brown and Emily Thornbury onwards.
I used to detest Thatcher when I was 18. Now I see that she would be a godsend to the country given the state of the Con Party and the Labour supposed opposition. The country is properly f*****
Thatcher was an opportunist and economic illiterate who did one thing right, and several things wrong, including encouraging that crook Rupert Murdoch to buy the Times, (because he supported her), laying waste to Britain north of Luton by way of a grossly overvalued sterling exchange rate in the early 1980’s, and throwing away all the revenue from the North Sea which should have been placed into a sovereign wealth fund and saved for future generations. We don’t want her back in power, thank you.
“(Conservatism gave him an identity. A way of defining himself contrarily.) He said he’d hated school. Hated his Left-wing teachers.”
If I’ve read something like this once, I’ve read it a thousand times in the last 40 years.
Why is this still the case?
Have Tory education ministers all been asleep at the wheel?
They haven’t got ten years.
And people from Teesside don’t have Geordie accents.
Other than that a lovely, well written piece with some good forward pointers.
He has flair as a writer but his pieces are too often rather incoherent.
Pedantic point: in his municipal days, Joe Chamberlain was actually a Liberal. He became a Liberal Unionist over Home Rule and later aligned himself with the Conservatives in the “Unionist” governments of the 1890s and 1900s, serving as a minister.
Houchen isn’t a Geordie either.
This article lost me and dribbled away into a mist when I reached the bit about Ben Houchen having a Geordie voice.
Back in the mists of time when Dominic Cummings was young and working on the No side of the North East Parliament Assembly idea promoted by John Prescott and supported by every council , major political party , quango and what have you,and their spads, tame journalists and the rest the No side had Cummings, John Elliott a full on successful businessman and Somewhere person, and an big inflatable white elephant that sat in the background on every TV interview he gave (after he had helped inflate it himself).
It was a uphill battle for an idea whose time seemed to have come following the recent Scottish and Welsh devolved administrations and it was a bit of a shock when the establishment side lost virtually by 80% to 20% in the vote.
It prefigured the same shock albeit with a narrower margin that happened in 2016 and is still playing out now.
I can’t say I expected the result, either of them, but I did feel that constant references to the Geordie Parliament back then would be counter productive in a region where around 400,000 Geordies are commonly taken as populating a region with around 2.1 million people who aren’t Geordies and many of whom actively resent Newcastle upon Tyne’s pre-eminence, especially those on the Wear and the Tees.
I was surprised that Tony Blair one of the 4 party Leaders keen on it back then kept banging on about this Geordie Parliament, as the MP for a Durham constituency near enough to Teesside to be a rural commuter land he should have known better.
Houchen was born and raised on Teesside and his accent is a Tees one he’s a Smoggie not a Geordie.
One thing is certain:
“Green” jobs will never match the number of jobs that green policies destroy.
‘…is corrupting..”? “… has corrupted…” surely!
A wobbly, unclear, drifting article, but one which attempts to discuss a truth – the Tories, as in the early 1990’s under Major, have become corrupted by power. The failed attempt to reinstate the corrupt ex-MP Owen Paterson, by using the pages of the Daily Telegraph and strong-arming Tory MP’s, was a turning-point. Many Brits won’t vote for Boris again. They are having a good look at Starmer, and like a lot of what they see: honest, intelligent, well-meaning. He needs to sharpen his ideas and focus on some key themes. Tory corruption and dishonesty should be one of them.