Last night, at Wembley, Sunak was self-deprecating and valedictory. He said thank you nine times to 7,000 Tory activists. It was his final chance to say something meaningful. We had a rote stump speech, with a few extra notes of strangled emotion, from a campaigner who’d already lost.

Outside the arena, his supporters queued for warm white wine, clothed in various blues, and brave face grimaced when asked how Sunak lost to a panto-Thatcher act. “Rishi will fight to the end”, said Rohan Thandi, a perilously young Durham student. “The one candidate who will never give in.”

They believed he would linger on the backbenches after this maiming. But most backbenchers don’t have a deluxe Santa Monica escape hatch to drop through. After this disaster, will he still be milking constituents’ cows in North Yorkshire in ten years’ time?

For it was a disaster. Sunak’s undoubted work ethic, his ability to absorb data, and his uxoriousness have counted for nothing. Pitched as an antidote and a rebuke to the tribal giggling and fecklessness of the Johnson era, Sunak has been outmanoeuvred by the candidate in the field who most resembled Johnson. Restored sanity is less enjoyable than more cake.

Relaxed and winner confident on the arena stage, Truss cut more slices: she would never, ever introduce new taxes. By going full cake, Truss has forced Sunak to become the establishment candidate. Sunak was the teenage Brexiteer who gave off a Remain air; the creedal Thatcherite who sounded like Tony Blair; the unironic patriot who looked less loyal to old traditions than his opponent, who once wanted to put the monarchy on the chopping block. He was a conservative saint with a liberal halo.

Appropriately then, Wembley prefered Sunak to Truss — his welcome was louder, and longer than Truss’s was. The Conservative Party here in Wembley doesn’t look that much different from the people in the streets around the arena. Chuntering old colonels are thin on the ground. Despising net zero targets and believing a woman is a woman cuts across ethnicities.

But the support of London, like the endorsement of The Times, and the blessings of Michael Gove, were another sign that Sunak had the establishment on side. The party may be run and funded from London, but its spirit, and its insurgent energies gather outside the city. Sunak needed Stroud, Ludlow, and Stafford in the last six weeks, not London. He needed the Telegraph, not The Times.

Regional Tory members are small town car dealers, borough councillors, and third generation family butchers, but after Brexit, their politics are gloomy and radical. They feel disenfranchised by their party; they feel anxiously, down in their marrow, that something vague but critical is under siege. Like Roger Scruton, they feel the “old courtesies and decencies are disappearing”.

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Their answer to end this season of insanity, poll after poll showed, is simple. Given the choice, they would landslide Boris Johnson back to the top of the Conservative Party. The next best thing is Truss. Her gags are not as good as Boris’ were, but she tells them what they want to hear: I will shrink the state. I will cut taxes.

Sunak’s response was a one man show where he split himself apart several times over. He promised to “tell the truth” — then told Tory members what he thought they wanted to hear. In Belfast: Sunak condemned benefits scroungers, after posing with a missile launcher slightly taller than he was. In Manchester: Sunak claimed fantastically to be “the most Northern chancellor in seventy years” to a room of Red Wall Tories. In Perth: Sunak laughed off the idea he would scrap the transport-them-to-Rwanda migration plan that (in saner times) he had “hoped to block”.

At Wembley, he resorted to the same clichés and worn-out formulas. “Maxing out the credit card” was wrong; only he could “safely steer us through the storms ahead”. Meanwhile Truss vigorously slagged off Sadiq Khan; the members screamed, and punched the air in gratitude. There was the difference in miniature. She knew what they wanted. Sunak was still the man who betrayed Boris, and raised national insurance.

This oddly static contest began in July but ended three months before in April. That was when Sunak Hindenburged. The revelation: his wife was a non-dom; he held a green card. He came across as shifty and disloyal. Nationally, his polling slipped 26 points, below Johnson’s for the first time. Among party members, the revelations about Sunak’s tax affairs did more damage to him than anything else. Truss began the contest with a polling lead of 24 points. Sunak’s team ordered miniature #ReadyForRishi bottles of suncream for journalists and made him do unsteady culture war pirouettes. By late August Truss’s advantage over Sunak had widened to 38 points.

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Sunak is not a chest-beater. When he promised a “major crackdown” on grooming gangs yesterday, he was less at ease than when he talked about the Bank of England. Simply: he is not crass enough to convince as a culture warrior. St Crispin’s Day exhortations turn to ashes in his mouth. “What’s the point in stopping bulldozers in the green belt” Sunak yelled at one early campaign stop, “if we allow Left-wing agitators to take a bulldozer to our history, our traditions and our fundamental values.” Do we think Sunak had anything to do with lines like that? All Sunak’s attempts to play this low enforced the impression that he was an establishment candidate, incapable of imagination, performing the stock idea of what an insurgent candidate should be.

If Sunak was what his supporters said he was — a brilliant, efficient, presiding mind — shouldn’t he have done better than this? Early in August, he told county Tories about his Californian dreams. Solid burghers and Ludlow retirees listened to Sunak lavish praise on Silicon Valley. Were his idols Churchill and Disraeli, or the podcasting investment gurus and austerely hoodied tech founders of San Francisco? The impression intensified at one early hustings in Eastbourne, where Sunak said the word “California” three times in ten minutes. “He kept talking about California and tech”, moaned one campaign source. They said Eastbourne, on August 5th, was the moment Sunak’s own team realised he was on Pacific, not Greenwich Standard time. Telling Britain-is-best audiences to slavishly follow foreign patterns was an avoidable self-own.

You began to wonder whether his reputation had always been a mirage. On Sunak world they had stressed his brow-furrowed, adult man competence. He promised he would tell the truth. Michael Gove, introducing Sunak, said that his man always told the truth. “I’m prepared to tell people”, Sunak said in July, “that you can’t have your cake and eat it”. It came back to “being honest with people about the challenges we face”.

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Unlike Truss, he had the power to face unpleasant facts. But unlike Truss he didn’t tell Wembley that he would never introduce new taxes. He was prepared to yarn on about political correctness, but he could never lie about the economic issues he really cared about.

After seven weeks of grinding, Sunak departs leaving one souvenir behind. His one flinty, Darwinian truth for the country. “Are we prepared to earn the success that we need in order to succeed in the world?”, he asked when the campaign began. Britain needed to compete, and its people needed “to be professional and ambitious and strive to be the best at what they do”. Could we be like him?

Though Sunak is young, last night he seemed old. He was an institution man in an era of discredited institutions; a millennial desperate to woo baby boomers; too conventionally serious for a politics now defined by tribal laughter. In the end, he failed his own Darwinian test. He did not have the depth, or like Truss, the ringing shamelessness, to adapt to the struggle.

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Starmer’s grand idea is to freeze the energy price cap at its current rate of £1,971, preventing further rises to an estimated £3,500 in October and over £4,200 in January. This will, he says, save households around £1,000. Now, when calculated on the back of a cigarette packet, this all seems to add up. The only problem is that households which use the most energy will be the biggest winners — and these tend to be richer households, with larger homes to heat.

The proposal, then, is classic Starmer: another sweeping gesture in a policy area that should be Labour’s for the taking. Consider the political context. The economy is flailing, the Conservative Party has moved on from an unedifying defenestration to an even more unedifying leadership election, and Corbyn and his outriders have largely been silenced. And yet, Labour’s lead in the polls has fallen from 11% in the week after Johnson’s resignation to around 5% since the start of August. On current boundaries, it leaves Labour 18 seats short of a majority.

The blame for this can be laid squarely at the feet of Keir Starmer and his economic timidity. As has been frequently noted, the British public sits largely to the Left on economic affairs and to the Right on social affairs (or on the authoritarian side of the authoritarian-libertarian divide). Research by Paula Surridge suggests the average position of 2019 Conservative, Labour, Liberal Democrat and Brexit Party voters can all be found in a Left-authoritarian quadrant. Even more encouraging for proponents of Left-wing economics is YouGov’s finding that, among people who consider themselves Right-wing, 57% say the government should have a significant or dominant role in managing the economy, while 48% think the minimum wage is too low. Starmer should be pushing against an open door.

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Is this the end of levelling up?

By David Jeffery

The Conservatives are clearly aware of this. It was, after all, George Osborne who introduced the “national living wage”, Theresa May who introduced the energy cap, and Boris Johnson who centred his premiership on levelling up. But we have seen no similar recognition from Starmer. Rather, despite standing on a largely continuity-Corbyn platform (in policy terms, at least) in the 2020 Labour leadership contest, he has tried to shift to the Right economically. “The role of government is to be a partner to private enterprise, not stifle it,” he wrote last year in a 14,000-word pamphlet which sounded more like a TaxPayers’ Alliance press release than Marx.

It also demonstrated that Starmer has learned the wrong lesson from Labour’s 2019 general election defeat. Corbyn’s personal unpopularity was an obvious cause of Labour’s drubbing, but his economic policies were popular — until people realised they were linked to him, or the Labour Party. (The same happened with Conservative policies under William Hague.) For all his flaws, Tony Blair was right to warn that progressivism was an electoral vote-loser; it’s that part of the Corbynite agenda Starmer needs to ditch, not the economics.

In this, Starmer shares the root of his faults with Rishi Sunak: both had been MPs for less than five years when they were put forward as party leaders; their promotions were rapid. And both are now floundering because they have no instinct for where their respective party bases sit.

But Starmer suffers, even more than Sunak, from a lack of political imagination. When the energy price cap was increased to £1,971, Starmer described the new level as “a very, very big problem”. And yet his new position is to keep the cap at this very level — by spending more than £30 billion. This is a politician who reacts to events, rather than shaping them; a politician who has no sense of what a better tomorrow looks like. By this point in the cycle, voters should be sick of hearing Labour’s next election slogan. Instead, Starmer’s only discernible pitch seems to be: “At least we’re not the Conservatives.”

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Perhaps that will be enough to win in 2024. But perhaps it won’t. Liz Truss, the clear frontrunner in the Conservative leadership contest, has a three-point lead over Starmer — and that’s amid a toxic internal battle with Sunak. Placing Starmer against a Conservative leader without the personal baggage of Johnson and with a clear vision of what she believes in will only make his own ideological vacuity more apparent. Yes, Twitter might titter at Truss. But when voters see on the news that Starmer can’t even decide whether to let his frontbench attend a picket line, that hardly seems important.

So what should Starmer do? Well, the most obvious step would be to recognise that things in the UK are just a bit shit at the moment, and a lot of this is down to short-termism. Starmer’s original leadership campaign slogan, “Another future is possible”, is probably the right one. But coupled with this optimism is the need to be as ruthless as the Conservatives, who are happy to reward their voters (the wealthy, the elderly, homeowners) at the expense of other groups who are less likely to vote for them (students and welfare recipients).

Starmer should also follow the “housing theory of everything”, which argues that a lot of problems in the UK are at least partially driven by a lack of homes being built in areas where people want to live. In the UK, that’s often due to the greenbelt, especially around London. Happily for Labour, a lot of those areas are Conservative or Conservative-Liberal Democrat seats. The party should explain how they will fast-track more houses in these places (a good starting place would be within 800m of all commuter stations). These people were never going to return a Labour MP anyway, but the policy could be deployed to show Labour can take tough decisions. Similarly, rich pensioners (who will not vote Labour) get a lot of money from the state which they don’t need and which would be better spent elsewhere, either on poorer pensioners (who will vote Labour) on the NHS or on social care.

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As for the cost-of-living crisis, if Starmer really wants to make energy more affordable, he needs to recognise that a price-cap freeze won’t help those who can’t afford to heat their homes now. Instead, he should take the £30 billion-odd this policy would cost and pump it into Universal Credit and council tax rebates for the working poor. For a long-term policy, Starmer should back large-scale, state-owned nuclear power and massive investment in battery technology, both tied to new apprenticeships and a green jobs revolution.

Finally, he shouldn’t be shy about what Labour councils are doing right. Under Corbyn, you couldn’t move without hearing about the Preston model, but since 2019 and the Conservative focus on levelling up, Labour seems to have completely vacated the pitch on local urban renewal. If Labour can’t do anything in opposition, it could at least tell people what they’re doing in local government.

Ultimately, however, a bold, economically Left-wing but socially-centrist policy platform is unlikely to emerge at the next election. As the saying goes, when someone shows you who they really are, believe them. And in the more than two years since he was elected leader, Starmer has shown very little sign of doing anything bold — let alone returning Labour to power.

In those final fateful moments, you can observe highly intelligent, highly trained professionals making error after error, gradually dooming them and their passengers. Despite the ringing alarms of the onboard systems, they lose sight of what they are doing or how to avoid the impending doom. They pull the joystick instead of releasing it, they shut down the working engine instead of the failing one, or sometimes the two pilots pull in different directions, cancelling each other out. Eventually, they hit the Point Of No Return and, shortly after, the ground.

The current Conservative leadership election has a similar atmosphere. Every day in this interminably long contest, the final two candidates fire out press releases and half-formed policy proposals, only to wind them back in — flailing around the controls they want to wield in a month’s time. Meanwhile, the country slides towards crisis.

Neither Rishi Sunak nor Liz Truss appears to recognise the serious problems Britain faces, both in the short and the long term. Analysts predict that the energy price cap will hit £4,400 this winter. As an isolated threat, that would mean deep discomfort for many. Combined with other price rises and increasing interest rates, it will mean destitution. Government will have to step in to prevent this. And yet it is offering only piecemeal solutions.

This might be forgivable if it were the sole issue to which the candidates seem oblivious. But everywhere you look, the country faces massive challenges that the governing party has no answer to. On housing, for instance, Rishi Sunak has swung behind defending the greenbelt, while Liz Truss has prevaricated and developed an obsession with “Soviet style targets”. But as anyone who has managed KPIs will tell you, if there is no target for something, the target is zero.

Beyond this, Britain looks forward to running out of water and electricity. Infrastructure projects that could have alleviated this have been bandied around and frustrated for decades, and little can be done to turn it around on short notice. They say the best time to plant a tree was ten years ago, and the second-best time is today. In Britain, the second-best time to begin is after three preliminary reports, two judicial reviews and a general election. The best time is never.

Even in foreign and military policy, the natural home of the Conservative politician, the reality is bleak. While the country has performed well in arming Ukraine, its own defence commitments have been mealy mouthed. Promised rises are undermined by inflation and clever accounting, while procurement remains scandalously wasteful. With beautiful bureaucracy, a chunk of our defence spending goes on consultants planning the next round of cuts and another chunk on how to cope with the last ones.

But this catalogue of woes just serves to highlight the most pervasive and surprising problem the Tory Party faces: it doesn’t care about politics. This is not to say that the party doesn’t care about winning elections. It remains ruthlessly committed to that and its record is clear. Even after the crashing scandals of the Johnson era, the incoming PM has a fighting chance of securing the next election, giving the Tories nearly 20 years in power. The problem is they no longer understand why or to what end they wield such power.

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Those on the Left must be shocked by how apolitical most of the Conservative Party is. I suspect no more than a handful of Tory MPs have ever read Burke or Hayek, unless they cropped up on a PPE reading list. They will be far more familiar with Isabel Oakeshott than Michael.

Factionalism within the party is therefore driven far more by aesthetics than by ideology. One former MP once told me that when he asked his association why they had picked him for the safe seat, he was told: “It was the lovely way you spoke about your wife at the selection.” In more than a decade as a party activist, I’ve met fewer than half a dozen mainstream Tories who could be classed as ideologues. At its best, this makes the party flexible and pragmatic, able to pivot around the issues of the day. At its worst — and it really seems to be falling into the worst now — it becomes listless, incapable and slightly baffled by the power it holds. It’s the cat that has finally caught the laser pointer.

The track record of the current government is testament to this. Despite coming to power with a majority of 80, the government has failed to push forward on any of its purported objectives. The government which claimed to be hard-line on immigration did nothing to reduce it. The government that seeks to be tough on crime has seen petty crime become almost legal. The government that complains about “woke culture” has done nothing at a legislative level to prevent it.

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Even on its beloved Brexit, the party tries to stoke an ongoing threat that it might be undone or revoked or strangled at birth rather than engage with the realities of leaving the EU. It has no clue whether Britain’s future is Singapore-on-Thames or shoring up the dying embers of Red Wall industries. Instead, it jumps to silly-season headlines on imperial measures and crowns on pint glasses. The party once sought to campaign in poetry and govern in prose; now it campaigns in shitposts and governs in tweets.

All of which reflects an emptiness at the heart of the current Conservative Party. Its politics and principles are skin-deep and conflicted. It is apparent in almost everything it does, from Remainer Liz Truss becoming the “Brexit candidate” for leadership, to the pious Catholic Jacob Rees-Mogg defending the serial liar and philanderer Boris Johnson to the hilt. In place of policy innovation, the party grasps around for yesterday’s answers to yesterday’s problems, copying the homework of a leader who has been out of power for 30 years and dead for ten.

In the place of politics, all the party can do is say things that appeal to the voters who keep returning it to power — the generally older, wealthier suburban dwellers. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the leadership contest. Last weekend, Rishi Sunak’s suggestion that he would cut degrees that don’t lead to good jobs was viewed by many on the Left as an attack on the university sector, or even part of a grand plan to exclude the working classes from the humanities. In truth, it is neither. It is Sunak appealing to an electorate who came of age when 10% of the population went to university and economic growth carried them to prosperity, and who now see their grandchildren laden with debt, unable to buy a home. It’s the “common sense” of the bloke at the end of the Conservative Club bar — not something that will ever seriously happen.

Equally tenuous is Liz Truss’s insistence that the cost-of-living crisis can be solved by tax cuts rather than handouts. Those facing the most acute pain pay no income tax and minimal national insurance, while much of their spending is likely concentrated on low-rated or VAT exempt items, such food. It’s preaching to the Tory choir, with a plan that won’t survive a collision with reality once she is in Number 10.

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I could go on through a dozen such announcements — the theme remains the same: Tory MPs and Tory leaders, saying what they think the person in front of them wants to hear. No plan for implementation, no plan for adverse consequences, no underpinning logic or principle. They are bricks thrown through windows with no notes attached.

Which takes me back to those panic-filled cockpits. With an impending crisis, they have lost sight of what levers they hold and what they can do, instead debating whether they want the chicken or lamb as the altitude warnings flash. The Conservative Party has fallen into a fundamental problem — it is unwilling and unable to address the needs of the day.

So when I look at my own party, I feel not fealty but disappointment. From the housing crisis, to the stagnating economy, to law and order, to the health service, there are solutions out there. Yet the party has given up on seeking them, seduced instead by the 24-hour news cycle, the focus group and the Twitter grifters. Neither leadership candidate offers much hope. Sunak looks like he will run the country like a private equity project, cutting any expense he can and damn the consequences, while Truss will run it like a village fete, harking back with boundless enthusiasm to the old hits.

Whoever wins in September, Britain will remain stuck. The Conservative Party is failing to adapt, failing to plan. The sirens are ringing. The ground is coming.

***

A version of this article first appeared on the Joxley Writes Substack

Finally, Liz Truss seems set to become the next Prime Minister. Labour can’t believe their luck. But if Labour think Liz Truss will be a walkover, they should think again. When the dust clears, they will be facing a formidable opponent.

For a start, Labour already have a longstanding women problem. The Conservative Party have had two women leaders, both of whom have become Prime Minister. Labour has a great record of powerful female ministers from Jennie Lee to Barbara Castle, but the highest position held by women in the party has been Deputy Leader. And even though both female deputies — Margaret Beckett and Harriet Harman — became acting party leaders neither of them became PM.

But while Labour needs to learn to take women seriously, they should take Liz Truss very seriously indeed. One of her overlooked strengths is that she has been on a political journey. Changing your mind is often thought of as a weakness in politicians, whereas in reality an unchanging commitment to ideology is one of their most eccentric habits. In normal life, we change our minds frequently and without fuss. As economist Paul Samuelson said, in a line so good it is often attributed to Keynes: “Well when events change, I change my mind. What do you do?” In itself, changing their mind humanises a politician — a particular asset in a time of popular revolt against out-of-touch elites.

But, more than that, making a political journey shows character. Three of the most significant politicians of the Blair era — John Reid, Alan Milburn, and David Blunkett — were great New Labour reformers who had started on the hard Left. Their politics had been tempered and strengthened by their journey. Liz Truss was brought up on the Left and attended anti-nuclear peace camps with her mother. She then became a Liberal Democrat activist, famously demanding an end to the monarchy to Paddy Ashdown’s discomfort. And when a Tory Cabinet minister she backed Remain not Leave, though she is now a passionate Brexiteer. Those surprised that Tory party members overwhelmingly see a former Remainer as the best defender of Brexit need to remember their New Testament: “There will be more rejoicing in heaven over one sinner who repents than over ninety-nine righteous persons who do not need to repent.” The redemption narrative is one of our most powerful stories: she who once was blind, but now can see.

The fact Liz Truss has been on a political journey also makes her a powerful communicator. Some of the most persuasive arguments in politics are based on empathy rather than angry disagreement. Liz Truss knows why voters find progressive policies attractive, which can strengthen the persuasive power of her arguments for people to change their views. And her speaking style is clear and simple. The listener readily understands what she thinks and believes. Her opponents who too readily dismiss her as simplistic are missing the point. Politics is not a mathematical equation — a ten-point plan won’t beat a five-point plan 10-5. The messages and policies that win are those that connect with the heart as much as the head.

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The Truss agenda is straightforward. The educational system is failing kids. Grammar schools would identify and help some bright working-class and minority children. The cost-of-living crisis is hitting wallets and purses. A tax cut would give money back to the public. Energy prices are spiking. Pausing the green levy would reduce prices. Now, there are good arguments against each of these policies, but they are superficially strong one-liners. It takes time to explain how grammar schools distort the education of the vast majority of pupils who don’t get into them, or to make the case that there is a danger that tax cuts lead to more inflation. The arguments against Liz Truss’s policies are strong but they need to be explained. And, as the old political saying goes, “when you’re explaining, you’re losing”.

Populist policies are popular because they give a sugar rush. The former Chancellor is formidably clever, he has been a lifelong Thatcherite and Brexiteer, and the interventions he drove at the Treasury — both furlough and business loans — saved jobs and firms. And you can see his frustration as the Tory party members ignore his commitments, his record and his achievements. But his floundering campaign should be a lesson for Labour if they want to confront Liz Truss. Rishi Sunak has repeatedly come across in the leadership debates like the cleverest boy in the class. His hand is up first. His answers are always by the book. His contempt for Liz Truss is withering. And it is all digging him a bigger and bigger hole, because while you can respect the smart kid, it’s really hard to warm to them.

The biggest frustration for Rishi Sunak must be that while his resignation caused the fall of Boris Johnson, the former Chancellor is being painted as the continuity candidate. And while Liz Truss says that she wishes the Prime Minister hadn’t resigned, and that therefore there wasn’t a leadership contest, she is taken as the change candidate. One of the best jokes in the US TV show Veep comes when Selina Myers uses the slogan “continuity with change” for her Presidential campaign. It works because it is bizarrely true — and it is true because that is what most voters want. They’re not revolutionaries, they’re realists.

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The Truss offer is continuity with the spirit of Johnson and Brexit while meeting the demands of the voters who were, and are, angry with the status quo. That anger has been the fuel of politics since the Global Financial Crisis — it was there in Brexit, in the Scottish independence referendum, in the rise of Corbyn, and in Boris Johnson’s 2019 landslide. The fact that such competing and conflicting political forces can harness that same anger signals that there is an underlying volatility in British politics that can be channelled in different directions by strong and intelligent leadership.

It is in leadership that Labour must contest most convincingly. Liz Truss will likely be undone by events. The cost-of-living crisis is of such a scale that it is hard to see any of her policies — or any of Rishi Sunak’s — that will be more than a drop in the ocean. To win, Keir Starmer must learn from New Labour. Attack the new Prime Minister and her government, but don’t nit-pick. The critique must be based on a vision of hope and a positive project that positions Labour once more as the “political wing of the British people”. Otherwise, Keir Starmer risks being just one more man, in a long line of men, who have underestimated Liz Truss at their peril. After all, there are no accidental Prime Ministers, and like the rest, Truss has guile, will and talent.

It is a clear and important attempt to address the UK’s deep regional disparities, without relying on traditional fiscal redistribution. But trotted out so much over the past few years, the idea has been emptied of meaning; it has also been almost completely absent from the leadership campaign amid the broader debate on tax cuts and the culture wars. Neither candidate has grappled with it despite Michael Gove’s urging.

Liz Truss, a self-proclaimed Thatcherite, has made much of her plans to deregulate the economy and lower taxes — music to many Conservative member’s ears. But when it comes to urban regeneration and boosting left-behind places her emphasis is on “new low-tax, low-regulation zones”. Her own launch drew parallels with the Thatcher-era regeneration of the London docklands.

But Thatcherism didn’t really have the answers. The hugely-successful London docklands regeneration programme has, for instance, been described by Dr Jack Brown as “an extremely un-Thatcherite mechanism for achieving urban regeneration”, since it saw the state (via the London Docklands Development Corporation) acquire land, spend money on infrastructure, intervene in the market and expand public sector employment. Hardly the free market free-for-all promised by Truss. Neither is Eighties Merseyside a great example of Thatcherite levelling up. All Michael Heseltine as Minister for Merseyside could manage was to prettify Liverpool’s docks and inaugurate a garden festival, neither of which had any long-term impact on the rest of the city.

Meanwhile, Sunak is rigorously and risibly also claiming to be Thatcherite. Patrick Minford, economist and former advisor to Thatcher, is having none of it. He quite rightly claims that no Thatcherite would have raised taxes to a 70-year high. At least Truss’ plan for lower taxes would leave more money in people’s pockets to spend in their local areas, nominally boosting the local economy.

Sunak can certainly talk the talk when it comes to levelling up — he has won the support of Tees Valley mayor Ben Houchen and signed the Northern Research Group’s levelling up pledge sheet — but it comes to walking the walk the former chancellor is immobile. During his time at the Treasury, he was a significant barrier to spending more on what should have been the Government’s flagship policy, including granting more money to levelling up when the policy was relaunched in November 2021 and placing his own leafy constituency – in the bottom 20% on the index of multiple deprivation – in the highest category for levelling up funding. If this is counts as having “readily embraced levelling up”, as Seb Payne wrote in yesterday’s FT, then I would love to see what Sunak would do if he were opposed to it. In reality, his instincts are more suited to the austerity era than today’s political context.

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Neither of them — nor the party at large — recognises the true scale of the problem that levelling up seeks to address; even fewer people in government realise just how expensive the policy will be. The scale of spending needed goes “far beyond anything currently being contemplated” by the government, says the Resolution Foundation; it is on par with the reunification of West and East Germany, says The Centre for Cities, and so is the cost: around £2tn. Yet the Government’s Levelling Up Fund is currently at a paltry £4.8bn, roughly the same as the spending on “Project Gigabit” (roughly around 0.25% of what Centre for Cities say is needed).

Perhaps inconveniently for our candidates, voters are now convinced that levelling up is important. Polling by More in Common in January 2022 found that 59% of voters think progress on levelling up will be important in deciding who gets their vote in the next election. Among the sub-group who swung most strongly towards the Conservatives in 2019, the ones the party desperately needs to retain if it wants to hold the hallowed Red Wall, the proportion rises to 70%.

There are, however, risks to uniformly embracing levelling up as a key policy. It is particularly problematic in areas of traditional Conservative strength in the south of England. In the South East, 25% of voters think it will result in less money being spent in their local area, compared with just 2% who think there will be higher levels of spending. In the South West, the figures are 23% and 5%. The Liberal Democrats have been making hay with this, painting levelling up as something which focuses solely on the north of England and ignores the very real issues people are facing in southern coastal or rural communities. Some Conservatives also fear this is the case. Perhaps it’s no wonder that those leadership candidates, for a party now 10 percentage points behind in the polls, are trying to downplay the policy.

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By Richard Bourke

But are the Conservatives really in a catch-22, whereby if they focus too much on levelling up they may hold on to some of the Red Wall at the expense of the so-called (and less rigorously defined) Blue Wall?

Not necessarily. There is a chance here for the new prime minister to properly embrace it. Only one quarter of voters know exactly what levelling up means, and one quarter have never heard of it — even though Boris Johnson described it as “the defining mission” of his government. So the new prime minister has the chance to reframe it as a policy for the whole country, one seeking to tackle the causes of poverty and a lack of opportunity wherever these are found.

Does either have the chops to do this? The scale of the costs involved — and the level of spending necessary — means Sunak is completely unsuited to the challenge. Truss, less so. In fact, one of her existing flagship policies might also provide the way forward for levelling up: “Covid bonds”. This is her proposal to package up Covid debt and repay it over a much longer term than the traditional government debt repayments of between 10 to 30 years, and separate it from traditional borrowing on the government’s books. It is an approach that could also be applied to the funding of levelling up.

Consolidated annuities (or “consoles”) — ie bonds that pay a fixed interest rate but have no fixed repayment date — could be used to fund proper levelling up at the scale required to truly tackle the problem. This would allow the government to separate levelling up borrowing from day-to-day borrowing, lock in current low interest rates, and free them from a set repayment date. Putting control of this money in the hands of Department for Levelling Up would also liberate the project from the straightjacketed thinking of the Treasury. The best time would have been when interest rates were truly rock bottom, but the second-best time is now.

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Tory voters say: spend, spend, spend

By David Jeffrey

There have been numerous proposals for what the new government should do under a levelling up agenda, some of it undoubtedly good — bringing back Gove as Secretary of State for Levelling Up, more devolution to combined authorities and councils, county deals, lifetime skills budgets, control of the bus network, prioritising spending in areas of deprivation — but the impact of levelling up will be limited if it is not backed up with significant financial firepower.

A proper funding scheme for levelling up is also necessary to reassure voters in the south of England that they will not be used as a magic money tree to fund spending in the north of England. It is also popular with Conservative voters: as I wrote here two years ago, Conservative voters as a whole think austerity has gone too far, and they want to see more money spent in their areas. This is particularly the case in the Red Wall. Only with enough money to go round, at a level suitable to tackle the UK’s long-term and deep-rooted issues wherever they occur, will the Conservative Party be able to hold on to both Red and Blue Walls.

Johnson himself recognised this, and used his final PMQs to issue a warning and a thinly-veiled dig at Sunak: “I love the Treasury, but remember, if we’d always listened to the Treasury we wouldn’t have built the M25 or the Channel Tunnel.” If we listen to the Treasury today we won’t get real levelling up tomorrow — or ever. And we’ll see Starmer in Number 10 come the next election.

Sunak will always be more comfortable in Davos than Darlington. But just as Thatcher challenged the traditional economic thinking of her time, Liz Truss could — at a push — do the same now.

This buttery patriotism is one part of Mordaunt’s political make-up. There is also a Cameroonian social liberalism, pro-immigration, and pro-LGBT rights; she is a Brexiteer. Her breezy-sunny style is giggly and Johnsonian. Mordaunt appears to not take herself very seriously. She wants to smooth Tory edges, get the party back to basics, and embody a cuddly new One Nation synthesis.

Her battered country and her fratricidal party are not really in trouble. They just need to rediscover who they are. Like every centrist — for that is what Mordaunt is — she thinks all sensible people share the same values.

Political colleagues say they have no idea what she believes or thinks. Only 11% of the public, and 16% of Conservative voters, can correctly name Penny Mordaunt when shown a photo of her. But Tory members, though they are old, anti-immigration and disconcerted by social change, appear charmed by this young, pro-immigration, social change welcoming candidate. The heart wants what it wants. It helps that she is never less than vague. “We don’t need a new role in the world — just to be ourselves,” she said in her speech. For party members she is a bare wall. They can light her with their flickering projections. A (supposed) mystery might be welcomed by the public too. After the too graphic, pointillist detail Boris Johnson forced on Britain about his own life, being unknown looks like a political advantage.

Compared with her rivals, Mordaunt’s political career has been low-wattage. Her family’s military background, and her sideline as a naval reservist, made her appointment as Secretary of Defence in 2019 a realised dream. It lasted for two months. She backed Jeremy Hunt in that year’s leadership contest. For that Johnson removed her from the post.

Luckily for us, Mordaunt used the downtime that followed to write a book “to learn more about my country”. Intentionally, and unintentionally, Greater: Britain After The Storm is filled with useful disclosures. Though it is written with a co-author, the book feels more distinctly personal than anything else Mordaunt has done in public. Nothing is more revealing than a person’s prose, not even nudity.

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The bare bones: after the financial crash, Brexit, and Covid, Britain needs a “well-executed national plan”. We are a country longing for a “mission”. Though we are apparently “living longer, healthier, happier, wealthier lives than ever before”, the median Brit, like the nation at large, lacks self-esteem. Only Mordaunt’s plan-mission — a project outlined with no more specificity than the frequent use of the word “modernise” — can make Britain better.

Greater divides into two parts. The first is an attempt to capture Britain’s national character through historical analysis, amateur sociology, and hair-thin observations. The second purports to explain what this “national plan” will look like.

If Mordaunt’s plan-mission is to work, it must be grounded in an understanding of what contemporary Britain is truly about. Early doors she informs us that “the British live on an island”, which is indisputable. Afterwards she makes a cacophony with adjectives. Britain is: industrious, international, cautious, creative, caring, trusted, frugal, fair, selfless, and modest. Then more word confetti: Britain is defined by integrity, sacrifice, honesty, modesty, loyalty, humour, compassion, generosity, love, courage, and defiance. All of these nouns could be lobbed at Cambodia and hit something. They are general, banal. Her words are indiscriminate, not accurate. Without precision, observation shrivels and dies. We can admire her attempt to taxonimise an entire country, but not the outcome. Is her writing better than her diving? No.

Every cliché about this country is on parade. Before politics Mordaunt worked in Public Relations. She knows received wisdom, aimed low, communicated breathlessly. Play the hits Penny: tell us about how much the British love queuing and moaning about the weather. (She does, a lot.) Though Britain is an “ancient” civilisation — not compared with Iran, or China, or Egypt, or any world standard, but whatever, she’s rolling —  it is “surprisingly modern” and “outward looking”. Yet we are also “suspicious of change”. “Sometimes”, she writes, “being British is difficult to explain.” It’s a sentence where the author’s unintended admission of failure lurks between each word. When Mordaunt essays the national character over about 100 pages, she falls back on recapping Seventies TV shows, and odd little factoids — “the majority of Britons eat meat pie at least once a month” — the ultimate significance of which remain obscure. How meat pies affect Mordaunt’s plan-mission is never explained.

Though she lambasts Britain’s apparent tendency towards nostalgia several times in the book, she is imprisoned by outdated notions. Her Britain of queues, rain, and “Sunday rituals” was a stock image when George Orwell wrote about it during the Second World War. The actual Britain, a bewildering mixture of hypermodernity and feudalism, where personal identity is thin, beliefs are fluid, and people mobile, is richer and stranger than anything Mordaunt can conceive of. But she would rather think about breakfast. She ticks off a Full English’s ingredients, then writes: “Not surprisingly, after such breakfast bowel-bashing there blossoms a stool of biblical proportions. Exodus by Caesarean section.”

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It matters that Mordaunt cannot articulate a single original notion about the national character. Disraeli intuited that the working classes were patriotic friends, not revolutionary enemies, and reformed Britain accordingly. Churchill understood that pigheaded British stubbornness could save the nation in 1940, when many in the establishment around him were defeatist. Thatcher understood that baby boomers wished to eschew the clammy, paternalistic collectivism of the post-war period for greater individual autonomy. Their visions were underpinned by new understandings of old national qualities.

Mordaunt sounds like a folksy Hovis advert not a Prime Minister. The language and the ideas are pavements that have been walked over many times. Her belief that Scotland won’t leave the Union is grounded in the notion that Scots, like the English, and the Welsh, and the Northern Irish, “moan about the weather”. If this were funny it might excuse the observation’s total lack of seriousness. But if you care about Britain it’s tragically shallow. Typically, other than this empty cliché, Mordaunt does not have a positive case to make for the Union. She does not seem entirely convinced that it should carry on. “If the Union matters”, she claims “it needs to be clear why. If the UK is to survive, its existence can’t be taken for granted.” That’s just another truism in a book stuffed with them. It is impossible to imagine Disraeli, Churchill, or Thatcher — or yes, even Johnson! — thinking this flaccidly.

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The big idea in Greater is “modernisation”. Mordaunt’s plan-mission “must start with modernising democracy”, which means fiddling about (yet again) with the House of Lords. Is kicking a few aristos around really more important than dealing with the country’s appalling productivity rate, stagnant GDP, and demented planning regulations? Mordaunt seems to think so. Modernisation starts with parliament, then ripples out towards the BBC, the military, the monarchy, the sciences, and the universities. What modernisation means is never explained. It is taken for granted that reform is a synonym for good.

But more than anything else, Greater feels random. This is what happens when you try to be all things to all men in the Blair-Cameron way, but you are not rigorous or thoughtful about it. In no particular order, and with no particular reason, Mordaunt quotes from John Stuart Mill, Margaret Mead, Richard Rorty, Billy Connolly, Gloria Gaynor, Afua Hirsch, Clive James, Malcolm Gladwell, Jo Cox, George the Poet, and “Austrian boy wonder” Friedrich Hayek. The lack of unity here, the looseness of these associations, tells us that Mordaunt is not a structured thinker. She has no philosophy, aside from a lazy-Whiggish belief in Things Can Only Get Better. She would like much more immigration than the average Tory member probably realises.

Mordaunt tacks to the centre, but ends up on the managerial Left. What she writes sounds like it was dredged from a particularly poor speech given at Davos five years ago. Do Tory members want to hear that “change is the engine room of equality”, or that “minority achievement is the stuff of which our dreams, history, and culture are made”? To support this Mordaunt invokes the lives of Horatio Nelson, Marcus Rashford, and Barack Obama.

Mordaunt moves on to her plan-mission. “We must rethink our institutions if they are going to regain popular support,” she declares. “It has to be a top-down as well as bottom-up approach.” Ok then. Government must do more, but due to its inefficiency, many of its tasks can be devolved to private charities. Big corporations are thinning out the state, but growth requires lax regulations and lower taxes. Progress will come from protecting dissenting minority opinions, but censorship is fine if it is developed by “elected and accountable representatives”, otherwise “violent noises from the looneyverse” will wreck public discourse. People shouldn’t be cancelled for having different views, but she approves of Trump’s Twitter ban.

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These grating inconsistencies cannot be papered over by her chummy, punch-in-the-arm patriotism. No part of the plan feels like it was inspired by listening to the electorate, or trying to work out what they want. Again: being a centrist means that Mordaunt thinks the British all basically believe the same things. All our differences can be dissolved in the sugar water of loving Britain; all our problems can be fixed with a bit of joined-up thinking about House of Lords reform.

She wants to heal us. At her launch on Wednesday, Mordaunt claimed the public were “fed up with divisive politics”. We need to get back to a saner, kinder politics: miniature Union Jacks, tolerance, fair play, compromise… Britain, she said on Wednesday, with a characteristic pop culture reference, felt like the crowd watching Paul McCartney at Glastonbury last month. We have digressed from the classics. “He was playing new tunes but what we really wanted was the good old stuff.”

For Mordaunt, then, “playing the good old stuff” means regurgitating a tired centrism. At this point “modernisation” is the shadow of a shadow, the echo of an echo. Maybe it doesn’t matter. Current polling suggests Mordaunt will beat any other candidate if she makes the final round. Scrutiny, starting with this evening’s television debates, ought to see her big tent ideas from a previous age collapse in on themselves. What if they don’t? The conditions that made Cameron and Blair possible are not going to come back. Saying that Britain can “rediscover” itself does not make it so. Real life has not been amenable to ideas like Mordaunt’s for over a decade. If the torch is being passed to her, do not expect its light to carry very far.

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Our exclusive poll provides an answer. For UnHerd, I surveyed three key groups in British politics — a sample of Conservative Party members who will determine the outcome of the leadership race, voters in the Red Wall who will ascertain whether the Conservatives can hold together the coalition who swept Boris Johnson into power in 2019, and a representative sample of all voters.

Our survey showed that the leadership race remains wide open. Among Conservative Party members, the slight favourite is Rishi Sunak on 18%, followed by Liz Truss on 15%, Penny Mordaunt on 13%, and Kemi Badenoch on 7%. This picture is to some extent mirrored in the Red Wall and among all voters, though the real winner among all these groups is “none of the above”.

Perhaps because the contest is so short, perhaps because so many people are running, the blunt reality is that nobody yet holds a clear and commanding lead. This race could yet go in one of several directions, which underlines how precarious this moment is for the party.

What, then, do voters want the next leader to focus on? The priority, as you might expect, is the cost-of-living crisis. Britain is heading into its most difficult winter for decades, with energy prices, inflation, low growth, and sluggish productivity all combining to undermine the nation’s finances. Even though very few of the candidates are speaking to these longer-term, structural difficulties — hardly anybody has set out a convincing case for tackling our productivity problem — our data shows that many voters are keenly aware of them. And they are deeply worried.

We also find a clear and present danger for the party —one that is a leftover from the Brexit revolt. While the Conservative Party leadership hopefuls have focused almost exclusively on pressing the case for tax cuts, thought to be popular among the rank-and-file, we find a far more nuanced story.

When asked whether the next leader should increase taxes and spend more on public services, keep taxes and spending on services at the same level as they are now, or reduce taxes and spending on public services, the story is not what you might think. Many Conservative Party MPs and their supporters are far apart.

Only a minority of Conservative Party members — 33% — say we should reduce taxes and spend less on public services while a plurality — 39% — want to keep the status-quo (the rest say we should increase taxes or are unsure). Yet Red Wallers are even less supportive of slashing taxes; only 15% of them want to cut them and spend less on public services while almost half, 34%, want to keep the status quo and a further quarter want to raise taxes so we can spend more on things like health, education, and benefits.

This is consistent with the longer-term trend in Britain — and one that every Conservative must note. As the National Centre for Social Research points out, support for slashing taxes and spending less on public services is actually a very fringe position, supported by around only 5% of the country. Over the past decade, against the backdrop of austerity, public support for increasing taxes to spend more on public services rocketed, peaking at 60% in 2017 and staying above 50% in the most recent data, from 2019.

I am not saying this is the right position, just that many Conservative candidates are firmly disconnected from the position of many voters — which may yet come back to haunt them, especially in those important Red Wall seats. As much research since the 2019 general election has shown, many of these voters have always sat further to the Left on the economy and further to the Right on culture than most Conservative MPs in Westminster.

This points to the major tension now at the heart of the Conservative Party in the age of realignment: a party that is torn between its tax-cutting leadership candidates and True-Blue Tories in the shires, and its new Red Wall voters who are either comfortable with the status-quo or would even like to pay a bit more to get better public services in return.

Given the current slate of candidates it is hard, if not impossible, to see how the party resolves this tension. Many voters, it appears, want a leadership candidate who is not on the ballot sheet; one who is willing to intervene a little more to fix what they see as a rigged economic system, while also maintaining a tough line on Brexit, crime, and reducing immigration. A Blue Labour or Red Tory candidate would go down very well in a poll among these voters.

Another myth that is blown apart by our polling is the idea, fashionable after Brexit, that British politics would soon swing back to focus heavily and exclusively on the economy. But this is not supported by our polling.

Conservative Party members do not only want to talk about the economy but also, in descending order, immigration and asylum, health, tax, Brexit, and free speech/cancel culture. For Red Wallers, too, while the cost of living tops the agenda, it is followed by health, immigration, taxes, and levelling-up, while among all voters their priorities after the cost-of-living crisis are healthcare, immigration, taxes, climate change, and Brexit.

In short, many people want to talk about issues that are glaringly absent in the campaign so far. Do candidates want to retain mass immigration? How will they reform the NHS and social care? How can levelling up become a serious and sustained strategy for driving growth and productivity? All have been conspicuously quiet so far.

The relative prominence of Brexit, immigration and, to a lesser extent, free speech and cancel culture really matters; these concerns all point to the continuing power of the “cultural dimension” in British politics which, increasingly, is cutting across the old tribal loyalties.

So, too, does growing public anxiety about the rising prominence of “woke” ideology. Several candidates — most notably Kemi Badenoch and Suella Braverman — are actively campaigning against it, however, with Badenoch warning against “identity politics” and taking aim at what she argues are supposedly impartial, yet woke civil servants, and Braverman pitching herself as the “anti-woke” candidate.

While the issue of identity politics is often dismissed among the Twitterati as a fringe culture war issue, and some don’t have a clear idea of what exactly “woke” pertains to, it is still important not to dismiss it. After all, we frequently poll voters about things such as the economy, productivity, levelling-up, knowing they tend to have very different views about what these things are.

When we told Conservative party members and voters that some leadership candidates were “promising to oppose woke ideology, on the basis that they argue it undermines free speech”, we found widespread support for this position. Our findings suggest that the free speech campaigns do cut through.

Nearly three-quarters of Conservative Party members, 69%, said they strongly or somewhat agreed with “the need to oppose woke ideology”, as did 40% of Red Wallers (versus 16% who disagreed), and 36% of all voters (versus 22% who disagreed). The perceived need to oppose wokeness is especially strong among pensioners (52%). This, to me, points to the beginning, not the end, of a growing debate about what this ideology means for British schools, universities, how we make sense of our history, and, ultimately, who we are.

This was all brought home to me at an event held by the Centre for Policy Studies, in the heart of Westminster, this week, where many of the party’s current and former advisors were agonising over the future of the party and conservatism more generally.

There appeared a broad consensus in the room that while the Conservative Party might still be holding the largest majority since the days of Margaret Thatcher it has nonetheless become clearly disconnected from many of the key groups that made this possible to begin with — whether on tax, the lack of attention to the big challenges facing Britain, or a growing public appetite to debate the ongoing effects of immigration, Net Zero policies, and culture.

This is certainly supported by our polling which suggests, clearly, that unless the next leader can repair and reboot the party’s relationship with the people who put it into power less than three years ago then it may not remain in power for very long at all.

Starmer’s face gets fixed with a faintly creepy spray on grin. His line is that, as he tours the country, no one is saying to him “we need a few more jokes, we need a bit of entertainment”. This feels like a very boring person’s view of what an interesting person is. It is also a Boris reference. Starmer’s calling card is that he is the anti-Boris: safe, steady, reliable, moral. Steve “interesting” Davis with a few more policies — though not that many more, it has to be said.

So is the “boring” jibe anything more than optics? Starmer clearly thinks it’s a lightweight criticism, almost beneath him to answer. He prides himself on being a grown up, serious. He thinks boring is a frivolous line of attack. But it is not.

The trouble with boring people is not that they don’t keep us entertained, but that they don’t engage us on a recognisably human level. They feel flat, two-dimensional  — even when they try to smile. Perhaps especially when they smile. Where is their shame, or hurt, or embarrassment? Where is the joy, the anger, the passion? To call someone boring is to say that, instinctively, we don’t understand what is going on with them; we don’t have any sort of access to their inner world, so they leave us deflated. Somehow, they are absent even when they are there before us. So when Keir Starmer answers the “boring” question with the apparently interesting fact that he once played the violin with Fat Boy Slim, we are even more convinced that he doesn’t get it. This is not what we are looking for.

Take Milton’s Paradise Lost. Why is it that Satan is typically understood as exciting and charismatic while God — the redeemer of the world no less — somehow seems deathly dull? Probably because the bad boy feels more fully engaged with the human condition whereas the divine archetype is distant and unknown. The former is hot, the latter is cold. It is, in metaphysical form, the Keir Starmer problem. Indeed, it’s the same problem that novelists have in trying to write compelling characters that are good people. We often identify so much more with the messily and morally compromised because most of us think of ourselves this way. Saints don’t engage us because they seem to float above the human realm, unaffected by the trials and tribulations of ordinary existence. Starmer doesn’t feel real.

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How Labour became the nasty party

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Simone Weil wrote: “Imaginary evil is romantic and varied; real evil is gloomy, monotonous, barren, boring. Imaginary good is boring; real good is always new, marvellous, intoxicating.” Here, she gives us a clue as to the conundrum: how do we make virtue interesting, compelling? The answer is first to show how real evil is empty and flat — ultimately life-denying. That it creates a wasteland of human flourishing. This is the place where nothing grows. This, Starmer could argue, is Boris Johnson’s Britain. In contrast, virtue really is much more exciting and deeply human – ultimately life-giving. It is the basis for human flourishing. This is how being good connects up with being more fully human.

But Starmer doesn’t give us anything like that. Like the Dementors in Harry Potter, he seems to suck all the hope from the room. He makes virtue feel as life-giving as a traffic warden. Take his reaction to having been exonerated by the Durham police over beergate. “For me, this was always a matter of principle. Honesty and integrity matter. You will always get that from me.” It is such a bad answer. Bad, because it’s way too confident in its own righteousness. “You will always get that from me” lacks humility and, even more importantly, any sense that as human being we get things wrong every single day. There is no openness and honesty in this sentence, no vulnerability to getting things wrong. And — worse still in electoral terms — it says: I am not like you.

Not having any access to Starmer’s hidden inner world, we begin to wonder whether his outer and inner life match up. Whether he’s wearing a mask. And the problem with wearing masks is that we inevitably begin to worry about what is being concealed. Does the reassuringly non-flashy Keir Starmer exist to disguise the persecutory instincts of his “never kissed a Tory” colleagues, the ones who will cancel us for any petty infringements of contemporary metropolitan standards? Is Starmer the safe frontman of the Manichean morality police who divide the country up into those with politically correct and incorrect views, sheep and goats, darkness and light? There never has been a one nation Labour Party, no sense of us all being in this together. Behind Sir Keir lurk the sharks of culture wars ready to feast on our sins.

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Of late, the vices of the Conservative Party have been on display for all to see. They are generally the hot sins of lust and greed. I am not trying to defend them, but you know where you stand with these moral failures. Just as you did when John Prescott lamped a protestor after being egged. But Labour’s virtues I find altogether more sinister. I think they are out to get me. To find me out and bring me down, without forgiveness, without compromise. I find Labour’s virtues so much more frightening than Conservative vices.

Boring is not about the absence of gladhands. It is about not being present to others, not seeming to be on the same journey of messy human experience. The cardboard cut out Starmer will get some short-term benefit from being the not-Boris. But it won’t last long. Boris was popular for a long time and for a reason. Starmer still can’t work our why. The mystery will always drive him mad. 

Whoever wins the Tory leadership contest is likely to compound this issue. Faced with, say, Kemi Badenoch across the dispatch box, Starmer will look uncomfortably like every jibe that the culture warriors have thrown at the Right over the last few years: male, pale, and stale.

The contest had already started before Pinchergate and Partygate. It was apparent in the disputes about the ending of pandemic lockdowns. Back then, the paternalism of some was at odds with the libertarianism of others. The policy differences reflected even deeper philosophical divisions, not least over how to approach the economy. These ultimately surfaced in different approaches to inflation, with rival positions staked out by Boris Johnson and Rishi Sunak.

Given the nature of the conflicts within the party what does it mean for the future of Conservatism? Johnson marked a new direction of travel, marrying a brand of patriotism boosted by Brexit with a redistributive economic policy. His rhetoric of “levelling up” indicated the way forward, implicitly abandoning Tory principles that had been in place since Margaret Thatcher. A party of low tax, low inflation, a small state and fiscal rectitude yielded to a programme of enhanced equality, public spending, and government investment in infrastructure.

These commitments, however, did seem to be nominal rather than substantial. Yes, taxation levels in the UK are headed for an all-time high since the Forties, but much of this reflects the costs incurred by the pandemic and anticipated damage from the stand-off with Russia. The same applies, in general, to levels of borrowing and spending. Under Johnson, though, there was no clear plan for future investment in public services, and little coherent thinking about the means of levelling up. Instead, there were promises, gestures and a plethora of slogans.

Slogans do matter, though. A fresh slogan licenses a new agenda, even if substantial change is endlessly deferred. And the reality of regional inequality in the United Kingdom is such that it will continue to fuel demands for targeted redistribution. Such calls generate wider pleas for social equality. In turn, this marks a potential long-term shift in the posture of Conservative politics. The idea that low tax will deliver growth, and with that an expansion of economic opportunities, is being challenged by complaints about persistent disadvantage. The old ideal of a rising tide of prosperity for all will have to respond to ongoing appeals for a baseline of equality.

As a result, Conservatism has changed tack. But this is not only because a new slogan has gained traction: the composition of the Conservative vote has also altered. Most obviously, going into future electoral campaigns, the Party cannot ignore the importance of the Red Wall. At least in the short term, Bolsover, Sedgefield and Bishop Auckland will be a factor in Conservative policy calculations if they want to win the next election. Having passed to the Conservatives in 2019, the Party will have to work to keep them from Labour the next time around.

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Johnson, then, while not representing seismic transformation, does offer lessons in understanding non-revolutionary change. Modern parties are institutional as well as ideological entities. Their persistence over time suggests an element of durability. But the longevity of the Conservative Party is also a product of its adaptability. However, its constant flexibility is masked by appeals to the past, especially to ideas associated with classic thinkers.

There is nothing exceptional about Johnson’s deviation from Tory orthodoxy; the history of conservatism is a succession of deviations. The Conservative Party is not an enduring institutional edifice. Behind the image of a timeless corporate identity lies the reality of endless incremental adjustments. Equally, there are no conservative principles which have retained their integrity through the ages. Instead, apparently similar doctrines changed their meanings as circumstances evolved.

Even the origins of conservative principles are contested. The etymology of the word Tory stretches deep into the 17th century. It originally referred to Irish miscreants and was later associated with Papist rebels more generally. Given this miscellaneous background, a significant number of historians trace the beginnings of the Conservative Party to English monarchists who defended the rights of James II when his title to rule was challenged by the Whigs in the 1680s. Yet for many, since the Tories made their peace with the Glorious Revolution, the roots of the Conservative Party are better traced to the era of Viscount Bolingbroke in the early 18th century.

However, when Bolingbroke’s campaign against Walpole’s Whigs was flourishing in the 1720s and 1730s, Toryism was more a set of ideals than an organised party structure. The Tories attracted a following, but they lacked the means of enforcing discipline. Moreover, their main advocate was associated with bottomless hypocrisy. Having supported the Jacobite Rebellion in 1715, Bolingbroke came to seek reforms under the Hanoverian regime by mobilising one-time Whiggish ideas. Equally, he rallied in public to the defence of High Church Anglicanism while circulating in private his freethinking opinions.

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Given Bolingbroke’s wayward character, and his apparently boundless opportunism, the sources of conservative principles are more often traced to Edmund Burke. There is no shortage of Tory publicists since the final decades of the 19th century keen to point to Burke as their primordial inspiration. In fact, by the Fifties, in the United States no less than the United Kingdom, the Irish statesman became a staple of Cold War conservatism in general.

Yet there has always been something odd about this deliberate appropriation. To begin with, throughout his political life, Burke was affiliated with the Whigs and not the Tories. Specifically, he was a partisan of the Rockingham Whigs from 1765 to 1782, and from then until the French Revolution he was closely allied with Charles James Fox.

Despite this, it seems that Burke, of all people, is most easily identified with modern conservatism because of his avowed hostility to the French Revolution. In the popular imagination, the events of 1789 mark the start of Left-wing politics. Burke, as a dogged critic of the new regime in France, is habitually branded as an adversary of all reform. Accordingly, he is painted as an opponent of the forces of progress and categorised as the high priest of tradition.

But given the erratic course of the Revolution, adopting it as a benchmark for right thinking is surely misguided.

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By Giles Fraser

In any case, it is inevitably distorting to view Burke’s career exclusively through the lens of the French Revolution. To begin with, his years as a Member of Parliament were largely spent in opposition and devoted to a vast array of reform measures. He was an avid defender of religious toleration, an opponent of increases in ministerial power under the crown, the foe of profiteering by the East India Company in South Asia, and a proponent of the rights of the American colonists against parliament. This last included support for their resort to arms against the British government. In fact, down to the last, Burke endorsed the general right of revolution against the state.

It is hard, then, to find in Burkean principles the origins of conservatism. Nonetheless, decontextualised precepts extracted from his writings are frequently deployed to guide conservative thinking. There is nothing peculiarly problematic about this procedure. It is a standard means of conferring an appearance of antiquity on new ideas. By these means, notably different undertakings can be absorbed into the semblance of a tradition. This is an inevitable part of the process of political change. Parties are most securely renewed by girding themselves with reassuring antecedents. Sober analysts, however, do not have to fall for the trick.

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The boomers destroyed the Tories

By James Sean Dickson

The current contest for the leadership of the Conservative Party is already being conducted in the language of Thatcherism, with candidates campaigning for a low-tax economy and advertising the virtues of a patriotic Brexit. This is because, most immediately, they need to appeal to the Party membership. But the new leader will then have to reanimate the ghost of Benjamin Disraeli since success at a general election will need an injection of one-nation Toryism. Disraeli’s “Tory Democracy” won new constituencies for the Conservatives, and Johnson’s successor will likewise have to appeal beyond the dependable cohort of southern middle class voters.  For this reason, the north midlands and northern England cannot be taken for granted. Once again, the Johnsonian ability to expand the Tory electorate will continue to impose a challenge on his successors.

In examining this process, the student of politics ought not to conduct themselves like political contenders or party managers, concerned with pedigree instead of the actual course of history. We should not be captivated by the mantras of Left and Right, or the slogans of Conservatism and Labourism. Parties try to orient their followers by brandishing jingles. Every healthy democracy will inevitably draw upon such stratagems. But there also needs to be space for sober reflection in which we are able to call the prevailing trademarks into doubt. Political pundits too often pander to the rallying cries of politicians. Serious commentary should stand back from this daily froth and aim for a subtler appreciation of the real forces in play.