Boris faces his sternest critics
BORIS Johnson is mustering the Tory faithful “face to face and cheek by jowl”, just as he promised in an online speech a year ago. Covid robbed the Prime Minister of a victory conference last autumn to celebrate properly his general election landslide and delivery of the Get Brexit Done pledge.
A year on from a muted virtual gathering, his troops arrive in Manchester this weekend in a far from exultant mood with those twin triumphs distant memories.
Technically, this year’s Tory conference will be a hybrid affair, with party members able to log in to the big debates virtually.
Yet the event’s organisers still expect around 10,000 attendees to pack into the Manchester Central convention complex over the coming days. Against a backdrop of the combined energy, food and fuel crisis, the atmosphere will be tetchy.
Tory grassroots members and MPs alike have much to gripe about.True-blue believers fear their party is becoming overly tinged with shades of red and green under Mr Johnson’s leadership.
The Government’s Health and Social Care Levy, to raise £12billion a year for the NHS and long-term support for the elderly and vulnerable, is seen as a Labour-style tax raid that will hit household budgets and act as a drag on employers.
Sceptics in the party, including Cabinet ministers, fear billions could be swallowed up by bloated bureaucracy and soaring consultancy fees in the ever cash-hungry health service.
A cap on energy price rises, a policy denounced as “Marxist” by the Tories until Theresa May pinched the idea from former Labour leader Ed Miliband, is destroying competition in the marketplace as smaller firms are driven out of business.
And while household incomes are squeezed by accelerating inflation, many Tories are increasingly nervous about the Government’s pursuit of the “net zero” target for eliminating carbon emissions by the end of the decade.
They fear a backlash from households forced to pay more for motoring and heating their homes while China and other fast-growing countries carry on polluting.
Rhetoric from ministers about the drastic need for action now to save the planet in the run-up to the United Nations’ COP26 environment summit in Glasgow later this month will stretch those nerves.
For free-marketeer Tories, the Government’s preference for bigstate solutions is causing alarm.
Mr Johnson and his allies need to brace themselves for some complaints from the conference fringe about the direction of Government policy. Some salvos may even spring from within Cabinet ranks.
The Prime Minister’s knack for shifting his ideological ground can wrong foot his opponents and supporters alike. No Tory can deny it helped to win votes in former Labour heartlands in the north of England at the 2019 election.
“The Conservatives are not an easy opponent to pin down,” the Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer moaned ahead of his party’s conference in Brighton.
The danger for the Tories is that a rejuvenated opposition proves equally adept at political crossdressing. In his conference speech on Wednesday, Starmer signalled his admiration for Tony Blair’s votegrabbing New Labour project.
A Tory government that abandons Conservative principles while presiding over a punishing squeeze on the cost of living for millions of families may prove vulnerable to the threat.
Mr Johnson should still have much to celebrate this week. The fact that the party is gathering “cheek by jowl” at all is a tribute to his Government’s astonishingly successful mass vaccination programme.
To win genuinely warm applause from his first truly “face-to-face” mass Tory audience for two years, the Prime Minister will have to serve up some genuine Conservatism in his keynote conference speech onWednesday.