The Last Judgement (Ian Forsyth/Getty Images)

Last year, the Conservative Party was in the grip of decadence. This year, it faces apocalypse. Their 2021 conference, in Manchester, was like The Wolf of Wall Street. Wine poured from the sky. Laughter ricocheted off the walls. They all thought, everyone did, that the Conservatives had another decade in power.
This year, in Birmingham, it was more 28 Days Later. The list of absent MPs, led by Boris Johnson and Rishi Sunak, stretched back to London. âThereâs nobody here,â one member who attended the last 12 conferences mourned. âIt feels deserted.â Twelve long years. We have tasted every philosophical flavour of Conservatism: David Cameronâs bougie-patrician, nudge theory-driven paternalism. Theresa Mayâs fretful Home Counties authoritarianism. Boris Johnsonâs giggly One Nation boosterism. All gone.Â
We have watched iteration after iteration of big ideas guru try to stir the Toriesâ heavy dough. We have seen Steve Hilton pad around Downing Street in his bare feet, intent on squeezing the entire civil service into Somerset House. We have seen Nick Timothy celebrated as an intellectual, for his beard as much as his brain. We have seen Dominic Cummings somersault from blogger, to Rasputin, to blogger again. How many of their plans â other than Cummingsâs Brexit, which he was swiftly bereaved of after squabbling with Johnsonâs wife â have actually stuck to anything? Theyâve all gone.Â
We are left with Liz Truss, and Kwasi Kwarteng, both anonymously described as âdeadâ before anyone even arrived at New Street station. The Prime Ministerâs âgrowth planâ has to work, and quickly. Labourâs poll-lead is as large as 33 points. Young conservatives filled Birminghamâs bars, happily blabbing that they will vote for Keir Starmer in 2024. âA 1997 wipeout might be the best we can hope for,â said one spad.Â
It really might be. For four days the Tories behaved like demons ambling across a tortured Hieronymus Bosch landscape. They squabbled and scourged and scratched at each other; so insular; entirely twisted up within their own canvas, seeming to forget that the rest of the country could see the black paint they were smearing everywhere. They fought over the Chancellorâs 45p tax cut U-turn; they fought over benefits; they fought over Suella Braverman and Michael Gove.Â
âWe are CONSERVATIVES,â boomed Kwasi Kwarteng during his Monday afternoon keynote. But the truth is, after 12 contorted years, none of them are sure what a conservative is anymore. Was Kwasi Kwarteng a conservative? Here was a man who was probably happiest picking through the back stacks of the London Library, cheerfully collecting obscure books on economic theory, shouting lines that could have been written for a dumbo libertarian congressman from Alabama.Â
Was Kemi Badenoch a conservative? Yes, said Conor Burns, MP for Bournemouth West. He suggested she was âthe future of the partyâ and understands the need to âmove beyond Instagram posts about free trade agreementsâ. Was Jacob Rees-Mogg a conservative? He floated around the fringe like a page torn from a Max Beerbohm essay, bantering about sending his children up chimneys, and thundering about a âreturn to common law principlesâ. The members loved him, they have always loved him, and as ever, they confused his impotent sarcasm for Wildean drollery. âWhat is my job?â he mused rhetorically at one event, and I was worried that someone might tell him: nobody knows anymore.
From the rubble, two conservative visions began to emerge. First, there was Michael Goveâs. He moved sprucely around the conference, making what political journalists call âinterventionsâ and firing what the armaments industry describe as âmissilesâ. Watching Gove at an UnHerd event on Tuesday afternoon, you could sense how good it was to be out of this government. He looked relaxed; in his conversation he rippled widely over Michael Oakeshott and Malcolm X, Hamilton and Dadâs Army, Lord Salisbury and TS Eliot. He did not have to say Truss was shambolic â or as she was constantly referred to everywhere here by Tories, a âdudâ. When he said the party could only win the next election if it returned to the âbedrockâ 2019 manifesto, the point was made. The British people were âBoris Johnsonianâ, said Gove. They wanted strong national institutions, strong borders, and âno flights of ideological fantasyâ. There was his vision. It was coherent, though until Truss goes, it will be ignored.
The other vision was Suella Bravermanâs. Unlike Gove, the Home Secretary spoke to the party, not the country. And she won this conference â the proof was in all the applause she was lavished with. On the fringe, Braverman performed a complex pirouette that managed to undermine both the 45p tax rebels and the Government. Gove and the rebels were âairing dirty laundry in publicâ â they had staged âa coupâ. And Truss and Kwarteng, she implied, had been too weak to stand up to them. Bravermanâs vision was Norman Tebbitism, rebooted for the culture wars, performed with jarring sweetness and enthusiasm. âMy delight,â she said on Tuesday, âis annoying the Leftâ. âMy dream,â she said, âis to see a front page of the Telegraph with a picture with a flight taking off for Rwanda⌠Iâm proud of the British Empire.â âGood girl,â purred a pension-age man in mustard corduroys sat next to me. Â
Away from the pride, and delight, and dreams, Bravermanâs outlook for Britain was bleak. Here was a country where the âPC Brigadeâ had infiltrated every institution of national life, the schools, the courts, the companies. Here was a country where drug use destroyed lives, where police took the knee, where pronouns proliferated all over emails, where migration was a flood, where men pretend to be women despite having penises, where nonces get more protection from the law than decent, hard working people. The liberal establishment hung over us all, a thickly overgrown canopy, and only Braverman had a machete sharp enough to hack it away. âWe simply cannot go on like this.â
But as with every other whinge and complaint at this conference (and they were legion), the instant thought was: isnât this your mess? Havenât you been in charge for 12 years? Why should you be trusted to clean it up? Anyway, Braverman had a solution. Build a new Royal Yacht, and smash a bottle of champagne on its pristine hull. The members adored this, and they adored her, just as they had adored Truss last year in Manchester.Â
And how was the membersâ new Prime Minister working out? Well.âThis is the Institute for Economic Affairsâ world now,â said one lobbyist. âYouâre just living in it.â Rationalise taxation by cutting it. Shrink government budgets. Put a smile on the face of wealth creators. Economic growth at all costs. (âYeah,â a CCHQ worker told me sarcastically one night, âbecause we never gave any attention to growth before Truss came inâ.)Â
By Wednesday morning, the situation felt terminal. When Truss brought the curtain down on conference, you could hear the ideological barrel being scraped, perhaps for the final time by this party. Truss described her ideas with simple, repeated words. Growth; delivery. She found her conservatism in the back of a cupboard in Tufton Street. When Truss said she would web Britain with superfast broadband, as Cameron, and May, and Johnson before her had promised, you were left wondering what any of these governments had actually achieved. The ânew eraâ she heralded was making the same promises the others had.Â
What Truss said hardly mattered. A consensus already enclosed her, as tall and bleak as prison walls. The Prime Minister was a dud and her plan would fail. Her colleagues said this, the press said this, even the members were saying this. The conferenceâs bitchy, scattergun in-fights were a series of ribbon-cuttings for the next leadership contest.Â
One night I bumped into Gary Sambrook, MP for Birmingham Northfield. I asked him how he thought it was all going. He looked momentarily stunned. A colleague intervened. âRemember what you said earlier Gary?â He did not seem to remember. âThat this is the best conference youâve ever been to?âÂ
âOh, yeah, thatâs right,â he said. It would have been cruel to ask him to tell the truth, for it was all around us, and had been for days.
Join the discussion
Join like minded readers that support our journalism by becoming a paid subscriber
To join the discussion in the comments, become a paid subscriber.
Join like minded readers that support our journalism, read unlimited articles and enjoy other subscriber-only benefits.
Subscribe