The opening speeches by the Tory leader, Kemi Badenoch, and her shadow chancellor, Mel Stride, to their party conference were loud with conviction but thin on substance. They felt like ritual incantations in a world turned upside down. Mr Stride’s pitch – £47bn of savings via welfare cuts and business rebates – is an empty promise given the party’s standing in the opinion polls. But it is a tenet of modern-day Toryism to preach austerity to the poor and indulgence to the wealthy.
The Tory party faces an existential moment. If an election were held tomorrow, some polls have the Conservatives in fourth place in terms of seats – having never finished lower than second in a general election since the 1830s. Their voters are turning away to support Reform UK or just not turning out. But why have we got here? A backward glance offers an explanation.
From David Cameron onwards, every Tory leader has faced the same dilemma: how to reconcile globalisation’s promises with its discontents. Mr Cameron’s politics led to a triangulation: he appeared socially liberal in a Blairite sense, economically liberal in a Thatcherite one. His project assumed that open markets and European integration would last. Like many centre-minded politicians, Mr Cameron thought politics was about managing capitalism rather than redistributing its proceeds.
That error lies at the root of a wider technocratic failure, according to one of Europe’s most important thinkers, Jean Pisani-Ferry. He admits that mainstream centrism “gravely underestimated the social and territorial consequences of our collective choices”. The trouble is, he says, that history is back. First the 2008 financial crash shattered the illusion of permanence; then Brexit gave political voice to the regions left behind.
Mr Cameron’s brand of liberal conservatism could not survive the return of politics as conflict. Theresa May tried with talk of duty and belonging, yet she lacked the parliamentary majority to deliver. Boris Johnson substituted theatre for policy, trading economic reality for spectacle. Liz Truss mistook performance for a governing philosophy, and her plans imploded on contact with markets. Rishi Sunak brought composure but not direction.
Mrs Badenoch inherits this exhaustion. When she says that “individuals know better than governments how best to spend their own money”, she offers certainty rather than strategy. She mistakes the repetition of Thatcherite slogans for renewal. Such is the intellectual torpor that at a Spectator fringe event, Pitt the Younger was voted a greater Conservative than Margaret Thatcher.
The Tory leader’s latest flourish is a Trumpian immigration hit squad, vowing to deport 150,000 a year. Like much of the post-Brexit right, Mrs Badenoch confuses decisiveness with coherence. There is no credible plan for where these people would go, how treaties would be upheld, or how overstretched institutions would cope. But the point is not to solve the problem, it is to dramatise it.
Mr Pisani-Ferry’s lament and Mrs Badenoch’s bravado share the same reckoning. The technocratic centre mistook stability for permanence; the nationalist right mistakes collapse for destiny. From Mr Cameron onwards, there has been a slide from complacency to panic to burnout – with each Tory leader trying to master a storm their own choices summoned. The Tories are finding out that history, having been declared over, has returned for its revenge.
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