Tories don’t have a God-given right to exist

There are no reasons why Mrs May’s party should escape the fate of centreright groups elsewhere

No political party has a God-given right to exist forever. This applies even to the Conservative Party, the most successful formation in Western democratic history, which has, until now, specialised in U-turning and absorbing rival ideologies to survive.

Its performance to date has been astonishing: the Whigs are long gone, but the Tories remain, having reinvented themselves more often than a brand of detergent. Since 1929, the first election for which women and men were enfranchised equally, they have held power for 57 out of 89 years. They survived the repeal of the Corn Laws (despite bitter divisions), the 1906 wipeout (they bought into Liberal reforms), 1945 (they embraced Labour’s massive state intervention) and Tony Blair’s 1997 landslide (they accepted shifting social mores and veered towards social democracy).

If like William F Buckley, the US journalist, you believe “a conservative is someone who stands athwart history, yelling stop, at a time when no one is inclined to do so”, it is clear that the Tory party isn’t really conservative at all. Its essence isn’t libertarian or classical liberal either. With the glorious exception of the Forties with Sir Winston Churchill and the Eighties with Lady Thatcher, when the party was led by idiosyncratic giants, it has followed social change rather than driven it. It is best understood as a brand franchise, a vehicle for pursuing power, while preserving the rough contours of society; on that metric, the strategy has “worked”.

Yet if they were an investment, the Tories would come with the disclaimer that “past performance is no guarantee of future results”. Their centre-right counterparts are in crisis in almost all other equivalent countries, and there are no fundamental reasons why the same fate couldn’t befall Theresa May’s party.

In France, the old centre-right parties stopped caring about what their voters really wanted, and are all now dead, replaced by irrelevant niche forces. The only question is whether Jean-luc Melenchon, who is even more Left-wing than Jeremy Corbyn, the National Front or Emmanuel Macron’s centrist party will win the next elections. In Italy, the pro-eu parties of the centre-right have been crushed and the populists are not just in government but climbing in the polls as they engineer a kamikaze showdown with eurozone authorities. The Northern League is even doing well in the South.

The situation is Germany is almost as volatile. The CDU and CSU are in catastrophic decline, and centre-right voters are peeling off to the ultrapopulist AFD; the backlash against Angela Merkel’s policies is reaching historic proportions. Centre-left voters are shifting to the anti-nato, anti-capitalist Greens and the Corbynite Linke party: with 44 per cent now backing parties that would smash the post-war consensus, German politics is nearing a traumatic inflexion point. In Spain, the centreright is enfeebled; in Quebec, a new, second wave populist party has just triumphed in regional elections. The Republicans are now the Trump party.

There are exceptions, as in Australia, where the Liberals remain intact and, for now, in power, and of course the centre-left is also being shredded everywhere. But those few traditional conservative parties that survive have invariably found some accommodation with the public over immigration and other “populist” issues.

That is why the Tory leadership’s fragile grip on reality is so terrifying. The Conservative Party may be able to fudge Brexit but it won’t survive a real betrayal. It cannot possibly thrive if it pursues the bland, trendy, “liberalleft” agenda demanded by the establishment. It cannot continue to preside over rising violent crime, increasing taxes, housing that is unaffordable to most under-40s and a dysfunctional health system.

The establishment view – that thwarting Brexit and maintaining the status quo in all areas of public policy is both right and electorally sensible – is idiotically complacent. Apart from a small core of wealthy “centrists” who were happy until 2016, the public are demanding a dramatic shake-up. They are sick and tired of elite obsessions.

Memories are goldfish-like. The Tories were facing an existential crisis by 2014-15, with Ukip poised to make massive breakthroughs. They won time by holding the referendum and then seemingly reverting to their old tricks, seeking to embrace the ideology they had campaigned against. At first, it seemed like a stroke of genius; but the delivery of Brexit has been staggeringly incompetent and the party is now hopelessly split.

It’s not just Brexit that could destroy the party, though that will be the catalyst. It has no idea how to fight for capitalism; no answers to the rise of identity politics; and doesn’t seem to understand the new ideological, valuedriven cleavages that are doing so much to upend politics. It doesn’t even empathise with its suburban strongholds, and is at war with other core constituencies, such as motorists. Philip Hammond may yet U-turn on manifesto commitments and increase taxes. Who are the Tories for now?

The biggest gap in the market is not for a fanatically pro-eu, metropolitan and corporatist party. The space does exist, but it’s only a little bigger than that occupied by the soon-to-bedefunct Lib Dems. Tragically, most Labour voters will stick with Corbyn, who has captured the anti-capitalist crowd. The biggest vacant space is for a new centre-right agenda: either the Tories will seize it, or somebody else will give it a go. The British Macron would not be a Chuka Umunna or an Anna Soubry: it would be a populist figure from the Right, albeit one who straddles the traditional divide.

Jeremy Hosking, a City financier and major Tory donor, has carried out private polling in a number of seats that shows “clear support” for a new party that would help achieve “what the electorate thought it would be getting”. Others are thinking carefully about similar options if Mrs May decides to keep us permanently in the customs union. A Vote Leave-style party could grab 30-35 per cent of the vote in swathes of the country, destroy the Tories and win seats even in a first-past-the-post system.

I don’t wish for this outcome: Corbyn would seize power, with cataclysmic consequences. It would be infinitely better if the Tories could do what they do best, come to terms with Brexit, find a new language to sell capitalism and reinvent themselves, absorbing and civilising the new populism. The question is: do they have the guts to listen to the voters? Or do they have a political death wish?