It was a ghastly humiliation for Mrs May. She deserved it
THERE is some justice in Theresa May’s ghastly humiliation last week. She did much to help kill the Tory Party. It is only fitting that she should be bruised by its flailing death throes. When she dubbed her own movement ‘The Nasty Party’ all those years ago, she was helping a powerful liberal faction which wanted to crush all that was still conservative in the Tory organisation.
Her 2002 speech was full of modish calls for diversity and embracing the 21st Century. Rather than fighting against the sticky menace of Blairism, she and the Tory liberal faction had chosen to embrace it and copy it. They didn’t understand how revolutionary New Labour was, because they knew nothing about Left-wing politics and less about economics. They didn’t necessarily even like it. But they thought that copying it was the easy path back to office. The steep and rugged pathway, of actually fighting for conservative, patriotic ideas, didn’t appeal to them at all.
As it happened, it wasn’t that easy. It would take years of copying the Blairites, of picking up hints on politics from Peter Mandelson, of stamping out pockets of conservative resistance, to turn the Tories into New Labour. They even found their own Blair in David Cameron.
AND all this finally bore fruit on February 28, 2008, when the then Director-General of the BBC, Mark Thompson, and his chief political commissar, Caroline Thomson, went to Westminster to meet Mr Cameron. The BBC still refuses to say what took place at this meeting.
I think Mr Cameron persuaded the new priesthood of the liberal establishment that he and his party were now fully Blairised. For BBC coverage of the Tories, which had been savagely hostile since the mid-1990s, softened noticeably and began to turn favourable. There was only one problem with this – the voters. Actual Tories were dying out and not being replaced. The comprehensive schools, brilliant at teaching their pupils what to think and useless at teaching them how to think, had been turning out Labour voters for decades. Try as the experts might to bend and twist the opinion polls, it was plain that the Tories could not win a majority in 2010. No amount of money or friendly media coverage could do it. The Tories duly lost the 2010 Election, their fourth defeat in a row.
They had spent eight long years of grovelling to The Guardian, and got no reward. They should have collapsed and split. Alas, nobody noticed. The Tories entered a shameful coalition with the Liberal Democrats, a party which despises and opposes almost everything conservative in Britain.
Millions of Tories seemed to think that being in office was more important than what you did when you got there. They were so pleased to see a nominal Tory in Downing Street that it took them years to notice that he was if anything less conservative than Gordon Brown, the man he replaced. And so we bumbled on, drifting deeper into debt, starting the disastrous Libyan war, solving none of Britain’s urgent problems and making many of them worse, until a tide of hedgefund money, pouring into Tory funds, gave them an actual majority in 2015.
This was a dreadful accident. And it finally exposed the problem. What the Tory establishment wanted, and what its supporters wanted, were two completely different things. Above all, this highlighted the linked issues of mass immigration and the European Union. Ukip rose and grew.
Mr Cameron, who has never understood the power of the European issue, airily promised a referendum on the EU. He did so to save his party, not to help the country. I am sure he never intended to win the 2015 Election, and hoped a second coalition would get him out of his pledge.
Instead, his promise may well have destroyed Britain as we knew it. We are now in a permanent constitutional crisis over Europe, as a pro-EU Parliament mechanically and sulkily goes through the motions of leaving the EU it wants to stay in. And it has exposed the emptiness of the Tory Party, which made a bonfire of what was left of its ‘nasty’ principles and sought to survive through big money and by sucking up to the BBC.
MRS MAY went to the podium on Wednesday as the empty leader of an empty party. She had nothing to say. The stupid slogan stuck to the wall behind her was so ashamed of itself it fell down. The special ill luck which befalls doomed leaders provided the cough, the attentionseeker with the P45 and the embarrassing, desperate standing ovation. There is no saviour. Making feeble jokes about Caracas or raising the ghost of Lady Thatcher will not fill the gaping void. The Tories have nobody left who really believes in anything. Meanwhile, the other side is full of people who know what they are fighting for and cannot believe their luck.
Once upon a time, it didn’t matter that the Tories had no ideas. But in modern Britain, faced with a Labour Party which intends to revolutionise the country, they had a choice. They needed to understand and fight this dangerous enemy. Or they could stop thinking, and become just like their foes. They chose the second weak and cowardly course. I shan’t be crying for them. They have at last got what they have long deserved. If anyone is going to save us from Jeremy Corbyn, it won’t be them.