The fatal weakness of the Conservatives is not seeing the kindness in most people
Whatever political dramas are erupting on a seemingly daily basis – with the flouncing off of the Brexit minister, Lord Frost, just the latest – most people are now exhausted. After repeated lurches from pessimism to optimism and back again, the pandemic will soon enter its third year. The fact that everything has suddenly been upturned at the time of year when we get up in the dark hardly helps. Neither does being led by people who disregard the same rules they want the rest of us to follow. I have been party to enough recent conversations involving rolling eyes and mentions of the clowns in power to know that this is now a big part of the public mood; the astonishing North Shropshire byelection saw it being expressed via the ballot box.
If the government has now lost a constituency where 60% of voters backed leave and the last Tory majority was 23,000, where are we? The answer, it seems to me, goes beyond politics and into people’s collective sense of wellbeing, or the lack of it. I am not sure whether human beings need strong leaders, but the idea that the people in charge ought to be responsible grownups seems pretty ingrained in most of us.
We now have an array of stories that seem to prove the exact reverse, which reportedly played their part in the Lib Dems’ win: Boris Johnson’s Peppa Pig speech; all those parties; the general sense of a prime minister and government now floundering from one crisis to the next. Thanks to the contortions of North Shropshire’s former MP Owen Paterson, the issue of MPs’ second jobs was also in the foreground. Everything fused with that weary sense of being taken for granted that you often pick up in ultra-safe seats, and the Tories’ fate was sealed.
One current element of politics feels particularly remarkable. During the pandemic’s past peaks, tropes about a supposedly unreliable public have often felt like the norm: TV interviewers’ habitually asking bereaved or ill people what they would say to those breaking the rules; warnings that efforts to control the virus may run up against mass “fatigue” and even social unrest. In fact, the past two years have seen the majority of us understanding the need for restrictions, and doing what has been required.
Conservatives, by contrast, now seem to be people who either break the rules, or are opposed to them. The result is not just a spectacle of endless hypocrisy, but the sense of an elite at an ever greater distance from the public: some achievement for politicians who put exactly that tension at the heart of Brexit and used it to their advantage.
Viewed from a slightly different angle, the current mess threatens another aspect of the Tories’ appeal to their voters, particularly relevant to the rise of Boris Johnson. In the runup to the election of 2019, I had occasional conversations with people in which
they acknowledged that he lived in a different universe, but deferentially saw that as the key to his breezy confidence and ability to get things done. Now, amid all those stories of illicit parties and his boundless ineptitude, that air of rarefied poshness may have begun to take on a very different meaning. The abiding impression is no longer of someone whose background ensures they are at ease with the demands of power, but of the kind of chaotic decadence that often comes with plummy vowels and the smell of horses.
If that gap between Tory politicians and the public is about class, another kind of estrangement is bound up with a lot of Conservatives’ beliefs. Brexit seems to have pumped a certain kind of Tory full of what an article in the Economist recently summarised as a mixture of “triumphalism and paranoia”: a belief that hard-right Toryism is heroic and visionary, but also constantly under threat (Frost’s exit plays to this narrative).
This is the stuff of fanaticism, which British people never like. Particularly when it comes to questions about Covid restrictions, it also seems to lead to a distinction between a lazy, herdlike public and rugged Tory true believers who would like to usher the country into a new nirvana of liberty and self-reliance but think the rest of us are probably not up to it.
Among Tory politicians, this is more a matter of latent belief than loud rhetoric, but its place in the wider culture of the English right should be jangling the nerves of any Conservatives concerned about their future. The editor of the Sunday Telegraph, Allister Heath, recently complained that we were “hardly the nation of freedom-lovers libertarian romantics naively assumed us to be, mostly preferring perceived security to liberty”. Too many of us, he said, “like to snitch on neighbours, and are pathologically incapable of rational, full-picture, long-term cost-benefit analyses”.
Much the same view lurks in a Tory belief that is mostly voiced outside parliament: the idea that Britain is hopelessly addicted to the NHS, usually explained using that hackneyed quotation from the Thatcher-era politician Nigel Lawson about the health service being the closest thing England has to a national religion. Our belief in universal healthcare delivered on the basis of need, it seems, is still seen as so irrational that it borders on superstition.
There are similarities here with Britannia Unchained, the free-market manifesto that was cowritten by five Conservative MPs, four of whom are now in the cabinet, and at least one of whom – Liz Truss – now apparently fancies her chances of being Johnson’s replacement. Remember its most notorious sentence: “Once they enter the workplace, the British are among the worst idlers in the world.” Before yet another U-turn, that rather misanthropic idea was recently recycled into the strange Tory war against the alleged depravity of working from home.
In August, one unnamed member of the Cabinet suggested that homeworking civil servants should have their pay cut; at the Conservative conference, amid bizarre jokes about “wokeing from home”, the party chair, Oliver Dowden, said people needed “to get off their Pelotons and get back to their desks”; Johnson joined in with his insistence that we should return to the office for fear of colleagues gossiping about us. Besides city-centre landlords, who was this for? Did they not realise it would soon sound not just unhinged but stupid?
If Johnson’s party can find no collective facial expressions other than sneering or smirking, it is hardly going to thrive. What the Tories seem to be finding out, moreover, is that a combination of hardcore ideology and the snootiness of the class system is starting to fatally weaken their claims to speak for The People.
Their flag-waving, John Bullish fantasies about our national character surely peaked in the slipstream of the 2016 referendum, and have since dwindled away in the face of proof that most people are kind, law-abiding, willing to make sacrifices for others, and prepared to put up with an amazing amount of what life – and the government – throws at them.
To end up on the wrong side of all that takes some doing, but that is what seems to have happened. Such is the puzzle that will be preoccupying Tory minds through Christmas and beyond: if populists lose their popularity, what then?