Where should a new Conservative leader start?

When the Conservatives had two million members it wasn’t a party of rallies or a cult of leadership, it was ordinary people across the country who organised themselves to get people they liked elected

The Conservative Party has just embarked on a leadership contest. This exercise in navel-gazing is necessary since the incumbent party leader, Rishi Sunak, is resigning following a Conservatives’ historic drubbing in the recent elections. The process for this election is only of real interest for its length - the final announcement will be made on 2nd November - and for the genuine uncertainty as to who will wear the poisoned crown. It looks likely that there will be at least six candidates. James Cleverly, Tom Tugendhat and Robert Jenrick have already announced their candidacy, to be followed, we expect, by Kemi Badenoch, Suella Braverman and Priti Patel. Much of the debate will be, at least initially, about the reasons for the party’s poll drubbing and this will focus on some broad ideological issues and some headline policy concerns.

The preferred narrative for some observers is that the defeat came about because Nigel Farage’s Powellite UK Reform Party syphoned off votes from the Tories. Without Farage’s insurgency, the argument goes, there would have been no historic defeat. And that this ‘truth’ therefore requires the Conservatives to reject ‘one nation’ conservatism in favour of either a Powellite National Liberalism or a Trump-like National Conservatism. The champions of this argument (other than Nigel Farage, of course) are Suella Braverman with her talk of the “lunatic woke virus” and Jacob Rees-Mogg with his references to the ‘Conservative family’ including Reform UK. Plus an emerging nativism from the likes of Nick Timothy and the ‘Future of Conservatism’ project at Onward.

The problem is that, as Robert Colvile observed, the voters lost to reform were not sufficient to make the difference between just 121 seats and a controlling majority. Losing votes to a Farage personality cult - not the first such occasion as we saw in 2015 and 2019 - is not the primary reason for the Conservatives losing so badly. Yes there are votes to be recovered from Reform UK, especially among younger voters, but a future Conservative leader would be foolish to make this the core of his or her strategy.

Related to the discussion about Reform UK voters is a debate, mostly marked by its total vacuity, about what it means to be a Conservative. There is a great deal of talk about values and traditions without shining much light on the reasons for the drubbing on 4th July. Some point to a conservatism of, to quote Braverman again, “...customs, religion, traditions, common law, architecture, countryside, our art and music, our educational institutions, our sporting traditions and our constitution.” This is standard conservative fare, not some great insight until you appreciate that the Powellite right of the party wants us to believe that these things were, in some way, under threat from the ‘lunatic woke virus’ and that the leadership of Sunak had done nothing to stop that virus spreading. The very pitch from parts of the Conservative right is inherently divisive.

The challenge for the Conservatives now is to do the opposite of splitting into squabbling factions each claiming ownership of the perfect construction of conservative ideology and the essential elements of an electoral strategy. Nobody is listening to Conservative at the moment except (and this is limited) other conservatives. Debating how many angels can dance on the head of a conservative pin may be satisfying for some but it does less than nothing for the Conservative Party’s chances of electoral recovery. The Party must assume that all who work to get Conservatives elected are de facto conservative. The party cannot have some sort of ideological purity test determined by how people voted in the 2016 election, whether they can define a woman, and their views on immigration or asylum.

We know the factors that make for unelectable political parties in Britain because we can look at the Labour Party. It doesn’t matter if you have great and appealing policies if the public think you are incompetent, divided and directed by a loopy ideology not the interests of the public. And that is exactly how much of the public see the Conservative Party. The task of a new leader must be to disarm these traps, not to create some sort of masterplan for Britain or, worse, indulge in the settling of personal or ideological scores.

It is difficult to demonstrate competence in administering government when you are in opposition but a new leader should demonstrate capability in those areas where he or she does have control. This means looking at how the party itself is organised, how candidates for office are approved and selected, and how this operation reaches out to the wider base of conservative minded people. Just as a new leader would do well to admit to the mistakes of recent years, that person would also be well advised to apologise to the thousands of people who, voluntarily, tramped the streets to try and get conservatives elected in July. As former Party chairman, Lord Pickles commented:

“The Conservative Party is only successful when it is at the heart of local communities. An over-controlling CCHQ works against this. It is time for the voluntary Party to flex its muscles.”

The new leader should also recognise that Labour’s commitment to further devolution presents new opportunities for Conservatives to demonstrate competent government without having first to win a general election. Similarly the Party faces a choice over its traditional positioning as the party of business - large and small. Much of UK business leadership does not share the knee-jerk anti-EU sentiment of the Conservative right, nor is it especially enamoured of the emerging anti-globalism, anti-trade outlook of Tories like Nick Timothy. Conservatives need to avoid becoming less supportive of capitalism than the Liberal Democrats. The Party has always believed that wealth and success flows from business not from government.

Like Britain, the Conservative Party is divided. Split over Brexit, over culture wars, over economic policy and over housing. One of a new leader’s first tasks is to find an accommodation between the Party’s various factions. And to recognise that, after the poisoned years since 2016, some of the divisions amount to little more than personal animosity and vendetta. We should hope that MPs and, ultimately, the Party membership do not reward petty vengeance over the long-term future of the party. In the end, however, division is resolved by not being divided, by not having the sort of drawn out self-harm indulged in by the 1980s Labour Party - a torment only resolved by the brilliance of Neil Kinnock’s leadership and Peter Mandelson’s marketing.

Kinnock never became Prime Minister but when he stepped down after the defeat in 1992 he left a party sure in its direction, as united as any party can ever be, and confident in its ability to govern. The challenges facing a new Conservative leader more closely match those facing Kinnock after 1983 than they do those facing the Conservatives after the defeat of 1997. Reform UK dangles a carrot of ideological purity, of “real conservatism” but this is a dead end just as Bennite extremism represented a dead end for Labour. Even with the most favourable circumstances imaginable - a disliked, incompetent Tory government, a media desperate to feed Farage’s fires, and an uncertain electorate - Reform UK could only muster 14% of the vote and five MPs. An important task for any new leader must be to set as much distance as possible between Reform and the Conservatives, to condemn its narrow and divisive ideology, and to observe that parties based on a leadership cult never make for good government.

Conservatives believe, above almost everything, that the protection and preservation of great institutions - private, public and cultural - is essential to good government. The Party perhaps lost sight of this in the difficult years following the Brexit referendum. In remembering this core value, Conservatives may wish to start with seeing the Tory Party as a great and important British institution. And that the new leader - whoever the Party chooses - might make their first task that of rebuilding that institution. Not just as a bunch of MPs but as one of the pillars of British society with associations, clubs, movements for young people, women and students, and deepening roots in the bedrock of our society. There is no ‘one true faith’ for conservatives, just a sense that as David Cameron once remarked, “there is such a thing as society, it just isn’t the same as the state.”

Most people are modest, moderate and responsible in their lives. Most people are conservative. It ought to be a straightforward task to build a party serving these principles. But the Party as it was when it had two million members wasn’t a party of rallies or a cult of leadership, it was a bunch of ordinary people across the country who organised themselves to get people they liked elected to councils and to parliament. Finding this simple truth might be the answer for a new leader.