Mrs May wasn’t a real Conservative to start with

Brexit failures aside, the PM preached high taxes and identity politics, while obsessing over trivialities

When Theresa May sacked George Osborne from Cabinet, hours after becoming Prime Minister, she urged him to go away and “get to know his party”. This exchange was typical of a politician who revelled in her stern, headmistressy image, as the “bloody difficult woman” who apparently reflected the views of rank-and-file Tories far better than the detested Bullingdon boys. Yet it was mere arrogance. Mrs May understood neither her party nor the vast majority of the electorate.

The PM will go down in history for failing to deliver Brexit. But it is in her equally disastrous domestic agenda that it becomes obvious that she was a Conservative leader who never believed in conservatism. Though she cited “security, freedom and opportunity” in her speech yesterday as values which “have guided me throughout my career”, she has showed no sign of caring about any of them

over the past three years. Contrary to conventional conservative wisdom, with its respect for individuals and civil society, Mrs May believes in an active state, and in 2017 unveiled what was arguably the most Left-wing Tory manifesto since the Sixties.

During the 2015 general election, Ed Miliband’s pledge to cap energy prices was derided by Conservatives as a deranged idea from the Seventies. Yet within two years, the policy had entered the Tory manifesto, along with a centrally planned industrial strategy championed by Left-wing economists, and plans for a £9 minimum wage surpassing anything proposed by the opposition in 2015. This was a radical departure from her predecessor’s “Big Society”, which though much-derided, had its roots in Burkean civic responsibility.

It is usually for Left-wing intellectuals to assume that the purpose of government is to distribute the collective wealth of society among its members. Yet under Mrs May, the overall tax burden on households and businesses reached a 50-year high. Despite an effective programme of deficit reduction, few politicians – certainly none at the Treasury – stopped to consider whether this might allow the removal of stamp duty, and other harmful, distortive taxes. Instead, it remained the overwhelming expectation that any excess funds be pumped into unreformed public services.

Indeed, Mrs May did nothing to tackle Britain’s great sacred cow, pledging to increase NHS spending by £20.5 billion more a year in real terms by 2023-24. According to the Institute for Fiscal Studies, almost 40 per cent of public service spending will then be going on healthcare. The NHS is sucking the lifeblood out of other public services, especially education and policing. Within a few years our welfare state will consist of a leviathan health service with a few minor functions attached. But that never seemed to trouble Mrs May.

She is said to have wanted to fund the extra health spending through higher income tax, which would have destroyed the Tories’ reputation as a party of low taxes if the idea hadn’t been defeated within government. Even so, she still managed to cede ideological turf to the Left. In the Dutch auction of public spending pledges, Conservatives are unlikely to out-bid the Labour Party – particularly one led by Jeremy Corbyn – but they can legitimise the Left’s spendthrift ways.

Mrs May seems proud of the mandatory gender pay reporting and ethnic pay audits she introduced. But these have fuelled the rise of identity politics, encouraging individuals to view the world through a postmodernist lens of power struggles and grievance. This rancorous ideology was also visible in the Government’s weak decision to sack Sir Roger Scruton from his position on a housing commission, without waiting for the facts to emerge. Per the rules of nominative determinism, even the name of the minister responsible for the decision – James Brokenshire – seemed to embody the ruptured link between the party and its grass roots.

Gone are the days of Lord Salisbury, a conservative PM famed for his “masterly inactivity”. In this bombastic era, leaders – even conservative ones – must have a vision. Mrs May’s vision – such that it was – was that of the social democrat. Under the auspices of Nick Timothy, her ideology derived from the 19th-century Liberal politician Joseph Chamberlain, a man consistently on the wrong side of history, whether on Irish Home Rule or the Corn Laws (he, predictably, favoured protectionism). Though much of this evaporated with Mr Timothy’s departure, any PM who would approve a continued customs union cannot value free trade.

Mrs May’s resignation speech attempted to identify some of the achievements of her tenure. Yet beyond Brexit failure, she will be remembered not for any vision, but trivialities; feeble bans on plastic straws and low-level letter boxes, pointless tinkering around the edges. In another famous swansong, TS Eliot’s The Lovesong of J Alfred Prufrock, the speaker laments having “measured out my life in coffee spoons”. In May’s case, it might be cotton buds. FOLLOW Madeline Grant on Twitter @Madz_grant; READ MORE at telegraph.co.uk/opinion