Do the Tories want an Everyman or an Ideologue? The party has entered a decadent phase

The game of Berlinian binaries still has life in it. Tom Stoppard is a fox, Alan Bennett a hedgehog. Tarantino is a hedgehog, much as he might resist the label, Kubrick a fox. Part of the fun consists in casting people in ways that run counter to their own self-image.

Of course, Berlin’s game only works well if applied to people who are in some sense accountable for their own philosophic or aesthetic vision. Party politics calls for different instruments (or should that be tools?). At the Tory party conference I toyed with sorting the delegates into swivel-eyed loons, fruitcakes and closet racists, but ran into teething problems. The binary format turns out to be quite important: “closet racists” collapse too easily into “swivel-eyed loons”, leaving “fruitcakes” to pick out a more heterogenous residue than it really should. The tripartite structure was good for the cadence the Cameron became lumbered with allegedly making, but bad for heuristic purposes.

But how should we group the four remaining leadership contenders, who are to be whittled away to two this week? The great tribal binary of recent years, Brexiteer or Remainer, took on quasi-Berlinian contours after a few years of attrition in the public imagination: more dependent, in the end, on impressionistic assessment than how an individual actually campaigned or voted. Notoriously, Liz Truss, a remainer, came to be outlandishly Brexit-coded, while Rishi Sunak, who swung behind Leave much earlier than it made career-sense for him to do so, lost that credential. Today, the tired and too-contested binary does little to distinguish the four remaining aspirant leaders of the opposition.

Instead, it is tempting to frame the decision the Tories face as one between an everyman and an ideologue: pitting Badenoch and Jenrick, comfortably in the latter camp, against Cleverly and Tugendhat in the former. To give a quick lay of the land: in their different styles, Cameron, Johnson and Major were everymen; Gove, Osborne and Rory Stewart ideologues.

The ideologue is marked by his possession of a theory, the everyman by his possession of a disposition. At the conference last week, candidates were clearly marking their territory. James Cleverly used his big set piece speech to chastise his party for its lack of “normality”. Meanwhile, a series of increasingly incautious remarks by both Badenoch and Jenrick, far from being ordinary gaffes, seemed more likely part of a brinkmanship playoff in which the pair revealed the more daring consequences of their ideological priors.

The Tory party conference, though, is most probably an ecosystem in which the ideologue enjoys an inbuilt advantage. Within the safety of the conference centre, conventional standards of political sanity can be temporarily forgotten. The Conference is a place where Mark Francois is stopped for selfies with unironic enthusiasm by young men and women. It is a place where delegates queue up to have novelty tattoos of their preferred candidates’ faces inked onto their own. It is a place where Peter Bone is able to show his face (though, in the presence of so many Tory staffers, perhaps we should just be grateful he didn’t show more). In defeat, the Tories seem to have entered a decadent phase — excitable, speculative, drawn away from the sobering responsibilities of power toward less worldly styles of ideological reflection. One popular Centre for Policy Studies event was titled simply, “What would Maggie do?”.

The ideologue’s challenges begin on the national stage, though, where their dogmatic allegiance to theory construction can alienate public feeling and be a liability in office. Truss was the ne plus ultra of the ideologue in living political memory. Of the current four, Kemi Badenoch seems most susceptible to being tripped up by her own ideological luggage. At the Conference, she pressed into my hands an inscribed copy of her 22,000 word pamphlet (“based on a forthcoming book”), Conservatism in Crisis: Rise of the Bureaucratic Class. It has four A4 pages of endnotes, and a runic pair of diagrams on page 16 involving triangular figures, with the words “right” and “left” written in them and bisected by lines at various angles. Such outward symptoms of crankishness are a gift to one’s political opponents. Ideologue-bashing is one of the shameful past-times of lazier elements of the media class. The flat-out dismissal that there might be any unifying diagnosis to be made of Britain’s long-term structural shortcomings is obvious and complacent anti-intellectualism. You can only discover the first-order merits, if any, of such diagnoses by actually looking.

The ideologue’s standing problem, then, is that he or she forgets that political success depends on appealing to people far less interested in ideas than they are. A more subtle obstacle is that sweeping political ideologies are not the sort of thing that should be perfected in advance, but instead evolve in tandem with the actual exercise of power. Many of the enduring tenets of Thatcherism were not established features of her political repertoire till her second term.

The everyman faces different challenges. He is famously discriminated against by the Conservative Party membership, who, like all party memberships, place a high premium on ideological purity. The more pressing danger this time round is that content-light normality can seem like an underpowered reaction to the scale of the electoral defeat the Conservatives suffered in July. These are activities better suited to the ideologue, but the everyman must engage the pretence as best he can.

The Tories are conflicted: torn between their interest in the diagnosis and their desperation for the cure. It has become a truism that electoral defeats are occasions for “soul searching” and radical course correction — as opposed to, say, brute manifestations of predictable cycles in electoral politics. While the ideologue wilfully indulges the urge for diagnosis, the everyman must artfully quell it by example. That is a hard role to play. Projecting a powerful sense of normality is not a normal thing to be able to do. It is a rare political gift; none of the remaining four possesses it. If the coming years are the Tories’ years in the ideological wilderness, it will be because the best way to avoid electing a weird ideologue is to elect someone weirder.

---

John Maier is an UnHerd columnist and PhD student at the University of Oxford

johnmaier_