How aristocratic excess infected the Tories Their most self-defeating legacy may yet be to come

To succeed, the Conservatives have always needed a cross-class coalition held together by an aura of being more competent at governing than first the Liberals and then Labour, and also being more committed to the Union. Even in the Thirties, when the Labour Party split, and during the Cold War years, when Labour twice ceded competence on defence with promises of unilateral nuclear disarmament, the Conservatives could never be the party only of capital and those who thrived under the economic status quo. During the interwar years and the Fifties they expanded their electoral coalition in part by getting more houses built.

But traditional centre-right parties will always struggle to construct such coalitions when growth prospects are poor and financial conditions inhibit younger generations  from acquiring property at the same rate as their parents and grand-parents. The unpopularity of large-scale immigration with the kinds of working- and lower-middle class voters who have historically eschewed the Left can only magnify the problem.

In this respect, the Conservatives have long required either relatively benign economic times in which to govern as in the Fifties, or the opportunity to make relatively easy to implement reforms as in the Eighties. But they came back to power in 2010 in an era marked by economic stagnation and political problems too big to confront.

By the middle of the first decade of this century, what the ancient Greek historian Polybius thought of as “aristocratic excess” was rife across Western democracies. Being both democratic (in giving all citizens a vote) and aristocratic (in concentrating power in the hands of a few), representative democracy risks both democratic and aristocratic excess. But since it has historically co-existed with a form of economic organisation in capitalism that creates large-scale inequalities, and was from the, 20th century challenged by the rise of technocratic national and international institutions, it has long been vulnerable to the problem of aristocratic excess.

During the Nineties and early 2000s, the dangers arising from this lay largely buried under the democratic triumphalism let loose by the collapse of the Soviet Union. But a reliance on finance-driven economic growth, and the EU’s moves to close down national democratic political contests over some economic issues, including pan-European migration, moved the problem of aristocratic excess centre-stage. In Europe, the French and Dutch “no” votes in 2005 to the EU Constitutional Treaty shattered any presumption that European electorates were at ease with the drift of power away from elected representatives. Then, the 2007-8 Crash drew visceral lines between those who benefitted from 21st-century global capitalism, and those who paid the price. It also accelerated the already declining rate of home ownership.

From the moment he became party leader in December 2005, David Cameron appeared ill at ease with a political world in which the problem of aristocratic excess had to be contained. Indeed, his strong preference was to wish away any need for the Conservatives to reconstruct a cross-class coalition by rendering the social conservatism and Euroscepticism of working-class Conservative voters, rather than deindustrialisation, the toxic legacy of the Thatcher period. Certainly, the 2010 Conservative manifesto paid lip service to the idea that there should be no return to finance-led growth in the post-Crash world. But in practice, Cameron largely assumed the party could govern as if the relationship between the governing and the governed had not changed since Blair’s heyday. When he proposed changes to the planning laws, it was to make extensions easier not the construction of new homes. If there were a strategy to kick-start the economy, it was only his Chancellor George Osborne’s bid to secure Chinese investment to fix Britain’s infrastructural decay and make the City of London a financier for China’s Belt and Road project just a few years before Xi Jinping’s Made in China 2025 incentivised all western states to rediscover industrial policy.

It was a similar refusal to see how far consent to the Union had broken down that allowed Cameron to let the Scottish government campaign for independence for months on end in 2014 before the panic-driven Vow to deliver more devolution, as if Westminster was indifferent to the outcome. Saved by the fact that Alex Salmond couldn’t find a solution to the Nationalists’ currency problem in a post-eurozone crisis EU, Cameron then had the good fortune to find an SNP that was popular without being materially able to deliver independence. Now, with not that many more votes than were won in 2010, the Conservatives could take out the Liberal Democrats as soft on the prospect of Labour-SNP co-operation at Westminster without having to address the medium-term existential problem facing the party.

Only over the EU did Cameron appear fully cognisant from the start of what had changed since the Nineties. Judging that sooner or later, the UK’s semi-detached position would have been put to a democratic test, Cameron made several efforts to reset EU membership before his gamble on an early referendum. But Cameron, and indeed the whole British political class, had little idea how to act in the kind of politics where strategic predicaments were being directly confronted rather than evaded. Having made his wager on his own powers of persuasion, Cameron then surrendered any notion of prudence by banning contingency arrangements for a “Leave” vote while promising he would implement a decision he had no intention of seeing through. The climax of this botched reckoning saw Osborne try to terrify the voters with the threat of a punishment budget to appease the financial markets.

Then came Theresa May, whose honeymoon period arose because she seemed able to subordinate her own personality to the new political reality. For a few fleeting weeks during the 2017 general election campaign, her promise to deliver Brexit as a Remainer appeared as if it could finally restore a broad cross-class coalition for the party. But once the spectacular failures during the second half of that campaign exposed the near complete absence of Conservative voters among not just millennials, but younger Generation-Xers, a spectre of medium-term demographic obliteration began to form.

Soon, May’s erroneous post-election assumption that, despite all evidence to the contrary, she could borrow Labour votes to get a weak Brexit through the House of Commons administered a more immediate near-death experience for the Conservatives. Johnson temporarily resurrected the party by his willingness to deliver a general election and put Brexit to a second democratic test. Yet it soon became apparent that many in the party assumed that, having pocketed the votes of the cross-class coalition of 2019 Conservative voters, they could govern as if nothing had changed.

Of course, the pandemic was an unprecedented derailment for any new government. But mostly what went politically wrong was born of a party that did not adapt to its good fortune. The “Levelling-up” agenda required an industrial strategy to have any chance of success, but the economic need for one seemed to Johnson’s Chancellors, especially Rishi Sunak, to cede too much political territory to Labour. Keeping both Red Wall and Blue Wall Conservative voters on side required reducing migration, but Johnson’s rule changes propelled it to record levels. Building new houses required planning legislation, but swathes of backbench Conservative MPs, including Theresa May, objected. When Johnson’s premiership then imploded on his character in the very year inflation returned, most Conservatives MPs were ready to grasp at any rhetorical promise of growth, however loftily conceived compared to the economic facts on the ground.

In crashing her premiership in a confrontation with the financial markets and the Bank of England, Liz Truss destroyed what little remained of the Conservatives’ claim to comparative economic competence over Labour, especially since the turmoil hit first-time house buyers. Crucially, by swiftly restoring the prospect of Labour winning a majority of English seats, she cost the Conservatives any chance of tactically falling back on the Union card. Sunak’s attempts to compensate elsewhere by shifting Rightwards on migration and Net Zero have failed because Boris Johnson had already sailed too hard in the opposite direction.

No other party has simply gifted power to the opposition simply by so repeatedly demonstrating what has become its essential narcissism. Not only has it offered no remedy for the problem of aristocratic excess, it has come to exemplify it, abandoning almost every kind of voter who gave it power and — from Partygate to Cameron’s lobbying for Greensill Capital to the election-date gambling scandal — visibly indulging in the notion that rules and restraint don’t apply to the powerful.

There is a scenario in which the Conservatives’ most self-defeating legacy is still to come. Labour appears to have learned the one thing that, for conservative reasons, must and can be done to stop the further descent of British politics into fragmentation: build houses. But when it is so hard to govern, the political furies are indiscriminate. Beyond housing, Labour is economically committed to the same blueprint of Net-Zero-led economic growth that Boris Johnson found could deliver neither levelling up nor a manufacturing renaissance.

There will be no repeat of the Liz Truss moment. But when it becomes clear that most of Britain’s problems these past 14 years were being presided over by the Conservatives, rather than caused by them, the implosion will quite probably overwhelm British democracy as we know it.

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Helen Thompson is Professor of Political Economy at the University of Cambridge and co-presenter of UnHerd’s These Times.

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