Tory wets face up to Brexiteers
AT WESTMINSTER the wets are on the rise again. Conservative Party moderates, once mocked as a bunch of drips by Margaret Thatcher and her allies, have started getting organised. Parliamentary insiders sense the Tory tribes are mustering for a new battle over the party’s future.
The Tory Reform Group, whose president is the arch-Europhile former chancellor Kenneth Clarke, this week named 14 MPs as parliamentary patrons. Anna Soubry, one of the most outspoken pro-Brussels voices in the party and Justine Greening, the former education secretary whose opposition to more grammar schools led to her falling out with Theresa May, are among their number.
Insiders say the group is determined to raise its profile in an attempt to counter the noisy European Research Group of Brexiteer MPs led by Jacob Rees-Mogg.
Formed in 1975 the Tory Reform Group drew together middle-of-theroad Tories nervous about the rise of Mrs Thatcher and her radical, free-market championing allies.
It trumpeted the “One Nation” Toryism of former prime ministers Benjamin Disraeli and Harold Macmillan. In the political language of the time the group was the home of the wettest of the “wets” lined up against the “dry” Thatcherites.
The Tory Reform Group’s renaissance this week is far from the only sign that a new generation of wets is banding together. Bright Blue, a new “liberal conservative” think tank vowing to be “pro-market, not free market” has been active for some time.
And a growing number of Tory figures have begun speaking out about the need for new ideas that seek to tame the free market.
SCOTTISH Tory leader Ruth Davidson, the darling of the Tory liberal wing, made a keynote speech about the party’s future direction this week. Her ideas included a call for large-scale state intervention in the housing market to build more affordable homes, tax rises to fund the NHS and relaxed immigration.
Chancellor Philip Hammond is expected to soon make a speech urging the Tories to ditch Thatcherite capitalism in favour of a “new market economy” to attract young voters.
Such calls for a break with the supposed Tory commitment to free-market economics come as a surprise to party figures not caught up in the new wet resurgence. Tory MP Conor Burns, who was close to Mrs Thatcher in her later years, admitted on Twitter this week he was “finding these arguments that we should ‘break from Thatcherism’ very odd”.
He added: “Looking at levels of spending of taxpayers’ money and the tax burden, we broke with Thatcherism a long time ago.”
Under Mrs May the Government has adopted an industrial strategy for a degree of economic planning, increased state intervention in company boardrooms, slowed the pace of deficit reduction and abandoned any pretence of cutting tax to fuel economic growth. Many MPs think her approach shows that far from needing to band together to fight for the future the wets are already in control of the party.
Brexit is the one policy area where the Tory wets are frustrated as long as the Prime Minister sticks to her promise of a full break with Brussels. They can still hope to force a compromise that keeps Britain more closely tied to the EU than many Brexiteers would like given the balance of opinion in the Commons as the next parliamentary battles over her exit legislation loom.
Tory wets hardly need to fight to seize control of their party policy’s agenda. Their increasingly co-ordinated activity is more directed at retaining that control when the time comes to find a successor to Mrs May.
Tory Brexiteers have been so focused on the prize of freeing the UK from the EU that they are behind their rivals in preparing for the ideological war over the party’s future. If they are not careful, they could find their hopes for the future drowned by the rise of the wets.