David Gauke is a former Justice Secretary, and was an independent candidate in South-West Hertfordshire at the 2019 general election.
It is all the Tory centrists’ fault. They have ruined the Conservative Party and are responsible for the forthcoming electoral cataclysm. This is an argument that I see on my Twitter timeline every so often but is now made by right wing commentators with some regularity.
Allister Heath says that “the wets and other centrist-dad wannabes… bear full responsibility”; David Frost made a similar argument and has complained about Conservative MPs opposing a tilt to the right, Sherelle Jacobs claims “the Wets dominate the Tory machine”.
Speaking as a “wannabe centrist dad”, I could take all this personally. I am on the political centre right.
But having resigned as a minister five years ago, left the parliamentary party a couple of months later, and stood against the Conservatives at the subsequent general election, I am not sure what more I could have done to escape responsibility for the current state of the party. I even write a column for the New Statesman, for goodness sake.
Let us put to one side my personal culpability and take the argument at face value. What is the case for the prosecution against the centrist wing of the Conservative Party for bringing the party to its current predicament?
In summary, it is as follows. Boris Johnson won a convincing majority by promising to deliver Brexit, and a hard Brexit at that. He also promised to bring down immigration and keep taxes low. He had a programme that leant into the realignment of British politics and was rewarded handsomely.
But in office he was thwarted in delivering a properly Conservative agenda by the Remainer establishment (the Civil Service, the OBR, the Bank of England, the judiciary etc) and centrist ministers. These same centrist ministers subsequently hounded him from office.
There is a temptation to skip over what happens next, although the most committed exponents of these arguments will make the case that Liz Truss was also a victim of the Remainer establishment. In any event, there is agreement on the right that Rishi Sunak is politically unsound and that is the route of his problems.
The Tories, therefore, find themselves fighting an election campaign with taxes up, immigration up, the benefits of Brexit unfulfilled, and Nigel Farage rampant. By not being properly Conservative, the right has been split and the consequences will be terrible to behold.
It is an analysis that may well be influential as the party debates its future in the coming months. It is also deeply flawed.
We should start with the 2019 general election. Yes, Johnson promised to keep taxes low. He also promised higher spending and levelling-up. Lots of things were promised, as is his wont. As an economic agenda, to the extent that there was any coherence to it, it was more left-wing than was offered by previous Tory manifestos or is being offered today.
Where Johnson’s position can be seen as being more right-wing is that he made Brexit a dividing line. He was going to get Brexit done, bulldozing his way through his opponents.
Now, we hear little about Brexit from the Tories. This, of course, is for very obvious electoral reasons in that Brexit is now an unpopular policy which a large majority regrets happening. Even Nigel Farage is reticent about talking about it and, if he does, complains that the Tories have failed to implement it properly.
This takes us to the charge that in office the Tories failed to deliver Conservative policies on issues like Brexit or immigration. Johnson had the freedom to appoint precisely who he wanted to ministerial positions. Frost negotiated his Brexit deal; Priti Patel was Home Secretary in charge of immigration policy.
If the policies pursued were not what the right wanted, perhaps responsibility lies here or even with their chosen prime minister.
There is always the Remainer establishment to blame, of course, but it is just possible that simple promises that appeal to the Daily Telegraph run into difficulty when being implemented. Hence slashing EU red tape or immigration or taxes does not happen even with a right-wing prime minister, leading a right-wing cabinet, with a right-wing parliamentary party.
Then we come to the removal of Johnson. The right has not really settled on whether they think Johnson was a colossus brought down by centrists or a free-spending, pro-immigration liberal not to be trusted. But there is nostalgia for his campaigning skills and we will hear the argument that the Tories would have done better had they stuck with him.
That is possible. But we should not forget that, for good reason, he had lost the trust of his parliamentary colleagues and the country as a whole. He was not brought down: he self-destructed.
On the subject of self-destruction, then came Truss. For the second time running, the right (and the right-wing party membership) got their way in terms of the party leadership. She did bulldoze her way past the Remainer establishment but only to collide with the reality of the bond markets. The Tories’ economic credibility was shot to pieces.
Then came Sunak. He was not the choice of the right but there was no other credible candidate. He, along with Jeremy Hunt, calmed the markets. Particularly in those early days, Sunak exuded a sense of technocrat competence.
That made him a distinct improvement on his two predecessors for many of us – but provoked distrust from the right, despite him having backed both Brexit in 2016 and Johnson in 2019.
He sought to appease them by, for example, refusing to put distance between himself and his predecessors (his failure to vote to uphold the Standards and Privileges Committee recommendations on Johnson was a terrible error).
Whether through political expediency or conviction, his policies have been right-wing, even if his manner often makes him appear to be a moderate. The ill-judged Rwanda policy has been maintained, and he flirts with leaving the European Convention on Human Rights. He prioritises tax cuts over credible spending plans.
And he fights an election campaign that focuses relentlessly on the Tories defecting to Reform, not those defecting to Labour or the Liberal Democrats. The right argue that he is not “one of us”, but he has damn well tried to be.
The charge that a shift to the left is the source of the Tories’ problems is absurd. There is, however, a more credible analysis that says that the collapse in support is not to do with ideological positioning but a question of competence and trust. After all, voters are going in both directions.
This is true. But the decline in competence and trust is inextricably linked to the move to the right. The Brexit Wars of 2016-19 resulted in a weak Cabinet that saw a commitment to the Brexit cause prioritised over ability. The Tories maintained the Leave campaign’s habit of promising the undeliverable.
A party serious about competence in office and building trust would not have made Johnson or Truss its leader. (Or, for that matter, Patel, Suella Braverman, or Nigel Farage.)
For all the complaints about the centrists and the inaccurate characterisation of Sunak as one, the right have to accept that this Conservative Party – one that is about to go down to an historic defeat – is their party. They have chosen the leaders (at least, until their choices imploded) and dictated the policies (at least, until they were exposed as unworkable).
What is about to happen is on them.
The post David Gauke: The Tory Right will try to shift the blame, but the looming disaster is of their making appeared first on Conservative Home.
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