How the Tories can crush Farage They need a new strategy, not just a new leader

What, then, if not tax cuts? Certainly, the new leader shouldn’t ape Farage and talk about reducing immigration. Voters are unlikely to have forgotten that the party promised this as the main motif of “getting Brexit done”, whereupon immigration sky-rocketed. Hence, there would be what we might politely call a credibility problem. Equally, those defectors to the Lib Dems who were repelled by the base morality of tax cuts are overwhelmingly likely to react similarly to a message that scapegoats immigrants for Britain’s fiscal straight-jacket and associated difficulties. Besides, the killer reason not to copy Farage is because to do so would play directly into his agenda of absorbing the Tory party into his movement. He could not have expressed this any more clearly than he already has: “Kill the Tories.”

Of course, the contenders could do what Labour did in opposition: say as little as possible and watch while the Government stumbles from one fiasco to another. Labour has not had the greatest start to its time in office, and so watching and sniping will indeed be tempting. But it should be resisted. For one thing, all the other opposition parties will be playing that game, and each has a different but highly focused audience more receptive to a fine-tuned message. Youth irritated by some new government decision will be drawn to the Greens who will have pounced on it. Scottish Labour voters angered by factory closures, will be inclined to drift back to the newly led SNP. Those Labour voters whose identity is bound up in the traditional priorities of care and compassion, already irritated by the cancelation of the winter fuel allowance, will be hoovered up by the Lib Dems positioning themselves as Labour’s conscience. Those Labour voters in Red Wall constituencies, already despondent that Keir Starmer has only noticed them in respect of their proclivity to riot, will be prime targets for Reform. In any case, hugely tempting as it is to join the chorus of derision at ministerial acceptance of smart clothing from Labour donors, this risks reviving memories of lavish wallpaper, duck ponds and Covid parties. Better not.

Fortunately, there is an obvious, tried and tested agenda which, astonishingly, the new Government has yet to embrace. Britain is being torn apart by regional inequalities far wider than anywhere else in Europe. We are no longer One Nation, as Wales, Northern Ireland, most of provincial England, and much of Scotland have diverged further and further from London and a few proximate gilded cities. We know it is an attractive policy since it is what Johnson was elected to do alongside Brexit: “levelling up”. The trouble is, he did nothing about it until 2022, when he delegated it to Michael Gove. Aided by Andy Haldane, Gove devised a detailed strategy which sat unimplemented because it was blocked by the Treasury. Like Andy Street, Gove bore the cost of Treasury dogmatism, but loyally refrained from resigning in frustration. Obviously, the new leader will need to apologise for some failure of the past government, but none of the candidates is personally tainted by this one.

This is an agenda which will be most attractive for the Red Wall. It competes with Farage, but will defeat him because, unlike his approach, it is strongly credible. The Farage solution to the woes of broken towns and cities is the wrong-headed scapegoating of immigrants. But what these places need is new futures, triggered by new jobs and new infrastructure. Currently, their future is so bleak that few immigrants other than a handful living on welfare are attracted there. And so the Tories should respond to Farage not by aping him but killing him.

Such a move would also appeal to the compassionate defectors to Lib Dems because it can be presented as morally uplifting. It would heal the rifts between those places which are thriving and those which have been left behind. The moral vote would be reinforced by a newly acquired empathy: many of the Southern Lib Dems who defected from the Tories are in towns such as Barnstaple and Portsmouth North that have themselves started to fall behind.

Doubtless it would outrage the imperturbably selfish activist cohort at conference — the Truss fan club who adored the package of tax-cuts for the rich and welfare-cuts for the poor. Luckily, though, it is a small minority: Truss provoked a record level of voter defection in her constituency, proving there just isn’t enough greed around for this sort of party to survive even one further election.

For the many Tories of integrity, the One Nation agenda would be appealing because it calls people to recognise the obligations of fellow-citizenship. Helmut Kohl successfully invoked that concept in his Solidarity Tax on West Germans to finance the reunification of Germany in 1992. At the time, East Germany was pitifully poor and unproductive in comparison with any British region. Today, East Germany has now overtaken many of those same regions. Recognising our fellow-citizenship is a morally compelling cri-de-coeur, long overdue.

Which brings me to that final, most essential and most difficult constituency, the young. We know that British teenagers are anxious: but ours are more anxious than teenagers anywhere else in Europe. They expect their futures to be worse than that of their parents. How, then, can we reawaken that sense of tingling exhilaration at being on the threshold of independent life?

Every cohort since the Fifties has been worse-off, age-for-age, than its predecessor. Those now retired have captured too large a share of past growth, and a new leader must acknowledge that. As the party of enterprise, the Tories could surely craft some scheme for start-ups explicitly aimed at ambitious youngsters who aren’t able to rely on the bank-of-mum-and-dad. Obviously this would require an act of supreme self-sacrifice by the retired — and something similar from the Conservative leader who might not want to risk losing the stalwart support of the elderly. But precisely because the Tories are currently seen as the party of the rich boomer, it might force first-time voters to completely reevaluate their understanding of what they know to be the “nasty party”.

Whether the candidate selected by the loyalist rump of Tories who remain voting members will have the wisdom to transform the party from its recent path to irrelevance, will not be revealed by what they say at this conference. That will merely be pitched to get chosen. The serious business will be to win back the three groups who have abandoned them. And wisdom has not been much in evidence in the party these past few years.