May’s successor must not be a centrist manager
The end may be nigh for the risk-averse PM. But the next Tory leader must not be a reheated Blair
Despite the Brexiteers’ demolition job on Chequers, Theresa May just shakes the debris from her Amanda Wakeley shirt and soldiers on. Though the summer air crackles malevolently with rumours of a leadership challenge, and a new Conservative Home poll this week, which names Boris Johnson as the favourite replacement, has only made things worse, she keeps going – today cutting short her holiday to meet fellow centrist Emmanuel Macron in the futile hope France will soften its Brexit stance.
Remainers and Brexiteers alike politely praise Mrs May for being “resilient” (an adjective that is more fitting of knotweed or a Nokia phone than a prime minister). But friends and foes alike know she is no leader. She is monotonously authoritative in the same way as a risk assessment form. She dislikes confrontation. Her populist instincts do not exist. And although it is not clear when or whether May will be ousted, one thing is certain: her successor must not be another liberal elite centrist.
The next leader must break away from the risk-averse managerialism that plagues our politics. From the vote for Brexit to the rise of Corbyn, people of all persuasions have rejected it. Leave voters are horrified at Theresa May treating Brexit as a damage-control exercise, not an opportunity. This follows exasperation at David Cameron, who sought to shield us not only from global volatility, but our own destabilising stupidity, suggesting that voting Leave would cause Armageddon.
Jeremy Hunt, who is eyeing No 10, embodies this tradition. He certainly has a talent for weathering political storms (BSKYB; the junior doctors crisis). He shows constipated caution on Brexit, and his health secretary stint revealed an affection for bureaucracy (roving hospital inspectors; grotesque splurges on management consultants).
We also need a leader that doesn’t suffer from the liberal elite’s creative sterility. Mrs May’s promises, such as to “remove the risk of uncertainty and instability”, are offered to the electorate like political tofu – blandly, nutritiously flavourless. But the problem is not just our current PM. We are still drowning in slogans recycled from the Blair era: the reusable coffee cups of “aspiration”, the 5p bags of “strong and stable”, the sensible second-hand cardigans of “appealing to the middle ground”.
I feel particular déjà vu with Michael Gove. On the podium he perspires with Blairite televangelism; the buzz words are different (“individual expression”) but his empty dreamland of airbrushed ambition – “a place of hope and healing” – is vintage ’97.
The lack of ideas is a symptom of that imagination-killing disease, centrism. The trouble with centrism is that it has no coherent identity.
It is purely relative, existing in contradistinction to Left and Right.
It is not defined by what it is, but by what it is not (not populist, not extremist). It is hard to create an ideology when your starting point is anti-ideological; no wonder the suitand-trainered policy wonks have failed to flesh it out beyond breathy fuzz like “global interconnectedness”.
Still, the liberal elite are convinced centrism is the only thing that wins elections. What utter rot. Their belief is based on the median voter theorem, a flawed 1950s rational-choice concept that says battling parties naturally drift to the “centre ground” because it enables them to hold onto voters at the extremes while competing for people in the middle. The snag is this only works if voters are motivated by narrow self-interest, and politicians act like “self-serving utilitymaximisers”. This impoverished view of human behaviour overlooks the power of ideas and political passions.
Centrists also think tribeless voters tend to be middle-of-the-road on key issues. But in fact swing voters typically possess a varied confection of Left and Right views (for instance, that we should drastically reduce net migration but also confiscate second homes). This crucial nuance means that conviction politicians have more leverage than is often assumed.
Instead of capturing the “centre ground”, the next leader should focus on grasping the “political zeitgeist”. Increasingly, the Home Counties Thatcherite has common cause with the Midlands Labour lifer who voted Leave and is baffled by their party’s matcha-latte-sipping hippies. Millions feel like Britain’s cantankerous old relatives in the basement, watching a world they do not recognise through a metropolitan glass ceiling. A strange white-on-white racism is taking form, with liberals branding Leavers “gammons”.
The centrists continue to ignore all this, of course, because they feel no empathy. Their fixation with “evidence-led policy making” means they only see people through the prism of a spreadsheet; ordinary citizens are compressed squiggles on a line graph (squeezed middles) or sugary acronyms like JAMS (“just about managings”). That’s why it’s time to ditch centrism once and for all. Let’s make politics about the people again.