This Tory rebel alliance should begin with Whitehall
Four days after a historic, epoch-defining Conservative victory and the mood is not triumphalist, it is one of relief. Relief that the country finally said no to debilitating indecision and the never-ending, anti-democratic rerun of the Brexit debate. Even Lord Heseltine has conceded defeat. The Lib Dems lost their leader and every single ex-Tory Remainer was beaten; it’s astonishing that these people ever enjoyed the attention they did. Thanks to the remarkable political skills of Boris Johnson, Dominic Cummings and Isaac Levido, we now live in an exciting new world, the one we should’ve entered immediately after the 2016 referendum.
The election wasn’t just about Brexit, however: there’s relief, too, that the country said such an emphatic no to Jeremy Corbyn. No to antiSemitism, to high taxes, to confiscation of property, to nationalisation, to hating one’s own country and to calling terrorists “friends”. Labour’s strong performance in 2017 – off the back of its lies about delivering Brexit – suggested that, maybe, Britain was on a turn to the far Left. Last week, absurd celebrities prophesied a red surge, making the age-old mistake of seeing a long queue at the polling station and assuming it was for them. It turned out to be for someone else.
As well as relief, there is also a palpable desire among the Tories to crack on and to prove that they are the true radicals. They have to deliver if they’re going to hold on to their new coalition, which is why the Prime Minister, wearing a red tie, chose to visit Sedgefield yesterday, a constituency that has voted Labour since 1935 and sent Tony Blair to the Commons. Sedgefield, now Tory, sits at the heart of an electoral revolution; Mr Johnson even talked of a “people’s government”, echoing the language of the early years of New Labour, when it was still in touch with the public. The Conservatives have broken the red wall and added countless working-class votes to their tally, people who have backed Labour for generations. Parallels are irresistible with both Margaret Thatcher, who won over skilled blue-collar workers, and Benjamin Disraeli, who invented the 19th-century One Nation coalition.
The One Nation alliance is often misrepresented as wet, paternalist and rooted in deference. This is a fabrication by wet paternalists. Both Thatcher and Disraeli actually won hearts and minds by challenging the political establishment and shaking things up: Disraeli defied the Liberals and improved working conditions; Thatcher fought the unions, cut taxes, reduced inflation and let people buy their council houses. The Tories might favour tradition and venerate great institutions, but they’re also a party of reform. Thanks to Brexit, they are once again anti-establishment.
Brexit is principally about getting out of the EU, but it has also shone a light on the systemic problems with our country: communities trapped in a cycle of decline, a feeling of powerlessness, a self-selecting political elite that ignores or actively thwarts popular opinion, obsessed as it is by a dysfunctional social media and declining, unrepresentative broadcast news. That’s why the new Government must roll out a massive programme of change, to use its honeymoon to challenge areas of public life that previous Tory administrations were too timid to touch.
The Prime Minister’s team has already begun by pledging not to back down on Brexit whatsoever; they will move on swiftly with trade negotiations. There are also plans to decriminalise non-payment of the BBC licence fee – ending an appalling injustice by which poorer people are penalised for not paying an exorbitant poll tax to bankroll a service that detests half its audience – and a plan to shake up the civil service, hopefully ending the institutional culture that stonewalled Brexit. If one adds in the manifesto pledges to reform justice and immigration, then all of this could go some way to putting the state back on the side of the people who pay for it. As the Prime Minister said yesterday, the Tories must seek to be the “servants” of the public.
Conservatives have to do what their greatest leaders have always done and reform the country in order to save what’s best about it – our free market, our free speech, our fierce independence. It would be madness for the Tories to win a marvellous majority only to allow the selfimportant bureaucracy to stay firmly in place, undermining democratic decisions because it believes it knows what’s best. They need to grab control over all the levers of power.
The coalition that elected Mr Johnson on December 12 was a rebel alliance. He must be, unreservedly, its champion in Downing Street.
Conservatives must reform the country to save what’s best about it – our free market, our free speech, our fierce independence
It would be madness to win a marvellous majority only to allow the undermining bureaucracy to stay firmly in place