Monster's Ball

The Strange Death of Tory England

There was a time when conservatives, with a small c, were supposed to be sensible, cautious, level-headed people; when the Conservative Party with a capital C had principles that you could at least identify, even if you didn’t agree with them. As the Tory peer Sayeeda Warsi observed last year, ‘Most Tories used to believe in democracy, the rule of law, and decency. We used to think this country was an amazing place where all of us who make it up could live together. We weren’t toxic mad fascists like some of my colleagues are now.’

Anyone who has followed the dizzying downhill trajectory of UK politics over the last eight years will know which colleagues Warsi was referring to. At the time there were those who considered her comments to be a harsh judgement of her party’s fortunes, but I would argue that it wasn’t harsh enough. Because the great problem the Tory Party has, and that those of us who are not Tories also have, is that the entire party has become a place where the toxic mad fascists set the agenda, and the Tories who are not mad toxic fascists are too weak and cowardly to face them down.

This is why the party leadership has invested so much political capital in the Rwanda policy, even though the ‘prime minister’ - you have to put the word in scaremarks - doesn’t believe it will work and has offered no evidence that it will work. The detestable rabble airing their rank ‘principles’ - scaremarks also necessary - in parliament last week also have no idea whether it will work, but that hasn’t stopped them presenting Rwanda as an ‘existential’ issue for their party and expression of the ‘will of the people’ - running out of scaremarks here.

In short, this is a party that has lost its way and gone over to the dark side. And the question is, why has this happened? What explains the implosion of the most successful political party in the western world? How did the toxic mad fascists break into the building and take it over?

The Republican Party in the United States has a similar problem, but the Conservative Party’s descent into the abyss is rooted in the very specific context of Brexit, and there is a fearful symmetry between the decision to leave the European Union and the proposal to fly asylum seekers to Rwanda.

Both are symptoms of advanced political derangement, in which fantasy has taken the place of the careful calculation that the Conservative Party once represented - at least in theory. Both are decisions rooted, at least in part, in xenophobia, paranoia, and anti-immigrant, anti-foreign sentiment. Both are regarded by their supporters as expressions of ‘sovereignty’ - regardless of the negative and practical consequences that unilateral sovereignty implies. Both are aimed at wresting the UK from European or foreign control, and both draw their emotional force from the idea that the UK has been victimised and taken advantage of.

Both of them are policies, or processes, whose supporters have bet their entire political capital, without any guarantee whatsoever that their bets would ever produce the outcomes that they predicted.

This gulf between expectation and reality doesn’t matter for the likes of Farage and Tice, who never take responsibility or pay any political consequences for anything, but it has had an extraordinarily destructive impact on the Tory Party, which has actually been expected to govern. These Brexit Tories are not like Sisyphus, condemned to push a rock up a hill that continually rolls back on them. For all their endless rage, bluster and fake-passion, they are political gambling addicts, throwing good money after bad, believing, in spite of all evidence to the contrary, that the big win is just around the corner - the one that will make up for the loss of the house and car and their shredded reputations.

From Brexit to Rwanda

As we have all learned over and over again, the architects of the Brexit victory did not know what was coming, did not prepare for any negative outcomes, do not even seem to have considered any other possibilities beyond the fantasies they presented to the public, and refused to take any responsibility when those fantasies burst, one by one, in front of their lying eyes.

Instead they blamed others, or looked around desperately for distractions, until finally they settled on Rwanda, even though none of them have any more idea whether the Rwanda policy will produce the outcomes they say it will, than they did about Brexit.

But Rwanda isn’t a mere distraction. It’s a direct response to the failure of Brexit, which contains all the essential features of that failure. It’s a demonstration of ‘sovereignty’ when sovereignty has so far produced nothing else. Brexiters promised that immigration would fall after leaving the EU. Instead it went up. Unable to use the instruments available to it through EU membership and the Dublin Convention, the UK became, for the first time in its history, a destination for ‘boat people.’

So Rwanda - a policy that will almost certainly fail - became the response to Brexit - a policy that has already failed. On the isle of Tory unicorns, when one miracle fails to materialise, and actually produces an unexpectedly negative result, you might as well offer a miracle cure. And this refusal to acknowledge reality has unravelled the Tory Party completely.

Once upon a time you could identify these tendencies through the various Tory factions: the Spartans, the European Research Group, the Five Families, the Common Sense Group, the New Conservatives, the Conservative Growth Group, the Net Zero Scrutiny Group. Now there is the latest insane iteration in Liz Truss’s Popular Conservatism, which its architects have catchily named PopCon - a name that doesn’t have nearly as much resonance as they think it does.

But the factions scarcely matter, when the entire party has succumbed to the same addiction to the unknowable, the same fanatical disdain for any legal impediments or limitations that might prevent it from doing what it wants to do, even if what it wants to do cannot really be done without harming the country it claims to represent.

Like Michael Douglas in Falling Down, the party has lost it. Infuriated by the petty humiliations that being in the real world involves, it wants to smash up the Korean grocer shop. Like a retired stockbroker in an existential suburban cul-de-sac, the entire party has drank the Jack Daniels, shot the dog, set fire to the house, and set off screeching into the political night, with no way back home.

The sickness is so advanced that every cure makes it worse. First the opportunist May latches onto Brexit only to discover too late that what she wanted to do can’t actually be done. Then the conniving fraud of frauds that topples her tries to do what can’t be done and doesn’t care, but gets brought down anyway by his usual moral incontinence. And now the Hunt/Sunak tandem that was hastily brought in to sort out the Truss/Kwarteng is madly dragging the country off to pariah status in order to get a policy off the ground that no one, literally no one, can demonstrate will work on its own terms.

Some of these tendencies were already present when Cameron stifled a yawn and agreed to have a referendum on EU membership as a party management exercise, casually offering the entire country as collateral, because why the hell not? It worked at Eton. And having lost his bet, the Great Man sauntered out of the casino, humming a tune, and retreated to his faux-gypsy caravan to rake in some lobbying cash, before boredom and Sunak’s desperation brought him back.

And all the time his party and the country as a whole descended into political chaos from which they have yet to emerge, and the rest of us cannot escape.

This is what political derangement means, and this is why the Tory factions are no longer just factions, but the splinters of a fragmenting party that has no other purpose beyond maintaining its choking death-grip on power - a wild-eyed party purged of anyone who might once have acted as a moderating influence.

Such lunacy has become so normal for so long, that it’s difficult to recall that there was once a time when the Conservative Party did not behave like this, or at least not to the extent that it does now. In his excoriating assault on the culture of lying and the ‘emergence of a new moral barbarism’ under Johnson and Trump, The Assault on Truth, the Conservative political journalist Peter Oborne remembers nostalgically how

Conservatives used to be careful students of history. They knew that men and women are frail, imperfect, corruptible and, at times, capable of great evil. That explains why they always paid such attention to the importance of institutions which, as Edmund Burke explained, embody wisdoms and truth which are beyond the comprehension of individual minds.

Personally, I don’t feel quite as nostalgic for this type of Conservatism as Oborne does. In my lifetime, and before it, there have been Conservative politicians and voters with far less philosophically exalted motives for their political choices than Oborne’s ideal suggests. But I don’t doubt that they existed, and still exist somewhere.

There were Conservatives who did not lie as a matter of course; who did not rush into uncosted budgets without considering the consequences; who took the national interest too seriously to squander it in the interests of their party or their own careers; who sought talent and ability, not chancers and loyalists; who did not attack civil servants as traitors; who did not oppose the Supreme Court when it found their decisions to be unlawful; who resigned when they were caught doing things wrong; who would not have elected as Prime Minister a man who attended parties hosted by the son of an ex-KGB man and then promoted that same son to the House of Lords; who would never in a million years found space for the likes of Lee Anderson, Suella Braverman, or Therése Coffey in cabinet.

Oborne himself is that kind of Conservative: a journalist of intelligence and integrity whose invocation of what he regards as the Conservative ideal is intended to show how far Johnson and his clique have destroyed it. Oborne goes on to quote from the philosopher Michael Oakeshott’s description of a ‘Conservative disposition’ which

understands it to be the business of government not to inflame passion and give it new objects to feed on, but to inject into the activities of already passionate men an ingredient of moderation, to restrain, to deflate, to pacify and to reconcile.

If there is any of that type of Conservative in the party of Braverman, Cleverly, Jenrick, Anderson, Truss, McVey and Sunak, they have kept themselves well-hidden, and when they have emerged from the shadows, they have either been ignored or pushed out of the party altogether.

But this is not a captured party; it’s a party that has destroyed itself and hollowed itself out. It was not conquered by Faragism; it conquered itself. Consumed by the struggle to make the impossible possible and terrified of being out-flanked from the right, its dilettante leaders gave their extremist fringes more power than they had ever previously enjoyed, and effectively invited the lunatics in.

Unable to make any sense of the calamitous legacy that Cameron’s poor decision had left them with, a succession of mediocrities and chancers sought to use Brexit to boost their own careers, promising non-existent opportunities and unrealizable goals that depended on politicians who were even more mediocre than they were.

This was why the 2019 election brought in some of the worst MPs ever to enter a British parliament. It’s why Johnson and Liz Truss became prime minister; why Robert Jenrick got any job at all; why Esther McVey is Minister for Common Sense; why Lee Anderson is Tory deputy chairman.

It’s also why the ghastly Rishi Sunak is fervently clinging onto a Rwanda policy that he doesn’t believe in, in a desperate bid to hold his imploding party together and prevent its factions from tearing him to shreds.

The good news for the rest of us is that the nightmare may finally be coming to an end. The polls consistently suggest a party on the way to political Armageddon, with eleven cabinet ministers set to lose their seats, and its MPs reduced to a post-1997 rump. The party’s core demographic is now primarily rooted in the over 55s. Amongst younger voters, Toryism has barely any support at all. Its party membership in 2022 was 172,000 - less than half of Labour’s.

Unless we assume that voters inevitably become Conservative when they reach a certain age, this is a party that has very little to offer the young in terms of a better future, and which depends on voters who look to the past, and - as the last eight years have shown - an imagined past.

For the millions of people that have had to endure the torment of the last fourteen years, this can only be grounds for relief. Not because of the quality of the government that will take over - that remains to be seen. And if that government does not succeed, it is entirely possible that the Tory Party may make a comeback, in an even nastier and more extremist form than its current incarnation.

For the time being, we can only hope and yearn for, not just for the defeat, but the complete destruction of a party that deserves annihilation more than any of its predecessors. Because only when that happens, will this country have even the slightest chance of repairing the damage of the last fourteen years, and emerging from the gutter into which we have all been dragged.