Rudderless, ideologically bereft Tories are drifting into an autumn of political chaos

What is conservative about a Conservative Party that wants to hike taxes and increase energy costs?

Ugly, wasteful buildings often come to symbolise the failings of a political era. For New Labour, it was the Millennium Dome; the Conservatives must hope that they won’t be remembered for the bland, pointless and, above all, monstrously disappointing Marble Arch Mound.

Whether or not the pandemic is over, politics as normal is returning to Britain. Shorn of their vaccine bounce and under pressure from an increasingly irritable electorate, the rudderless, ideologically bereft Tories are drifting into an autumn of political carnage. The post-lockdown economic boomlet will count for nothing. The public is moving on from Covid, and yet the Government has little to offer it. It has no answers on how to rebuild the institutions most shattered by the virus and lockdowns, including the NHS, schools and parts of the lower-skilled labour market, and its solutions to the epochal challenges facing the country seem almost designed to infuriate its supporters. Absurdly for a government ushered into power by a populist rebellion, it has lost its popular touch.

Its greatest problem is that, with Covid largely out of the way, it has forgotten its raison d’être. Levelling up doesn’t count, as nobody understands what it means. What is the point or purpose of this Tory government, apart from the maintenance of power? What can it do to help its voters, old and new, fulfil their dreams, apart from taxing them more, making their lives harder and telling them not to wash their dishes any longer? How would anything be meaningfully different were another party, or simply a bunch of unelected technocrats, in power? What is distinctively conservative about this Conservative Party? Once it has worked all of this out, the message needs to be sold – but without a vision and a plan, there can be no meaningful communication.

There was no such confusion two years ago when Boris Johnson became Tory leader, and saved his party from oblivion. He focused ruthlessly on his target audience. He took on three clear missions that only he could deliver: the defeat of Jeremy Corbyn; a real Brexit to rescue the country from discredited political, legal and economic “experts”; and a Northern-accented, culturally conservative Toryism committed to tackling the problems – crime, jobs, tax, the NHS, geographic decline – that the electorate truly cared about.

It is this critical third plank of Johnsonism – politics as centre-right consumerism – that lies in tatters, a mess of contradictions and blather, and only partly because of Covid.

In education, social policy, the environment, transport, health and, most bizarrely, the economy, the Blob is back. An ideological vacuum has re-empowered the technocratic establishment, encouraging it to push through inane policies further to the Left than anything New Labour would have proposed. Radical decarbonisation, the one area least likely to interest and most likely to terrify the Tory base, has become the most salient issue in the media, causing supporters to question the Government’s sense of priorities.

It will take years for school standards to recover. The universities aren’t being meaningfully reformed. Trains are going the way of the appalling British Rail. The war on cars infuriates Tory supporters. The consensus on keeping welfare low to incentivise work is fraying. The labour market is ever more regulated, as the Government gradually adopts every rule ever proposed by Labour (the next ones will surely hurt businesses seeking to ask staff to return to offices).

The fact that it is now boasting about a proposed hike in National Insurance epitomises all that is wrong with this Government. Since when do Tories gladly put up taxes? Do they not remember the fury among Tory voters when Gordon Brown announced his seminal tax on jobs in 2002? Can they not see that a Tory government should be proposing an insurance scheme for social care, harnessing markets, rather than seeking to create another calamitous Nhs-style system?

There may be a way to greenify an economy without hurting consumers, by inventing materials to replace plastics and promoting electric cars properly. But this Government appears intent on botching it. It’s not just likely to inflict massive costs on its electorate, all too often it seems to relish doing so. It is now hinting at a delay on the gas boiler ban but the latest wheeze – rumours of a tax on heating gas – is reminiscent of Ken Clarke’s calamitous VAT hike on domestic fuel in 1994 which helped annihilate John Major.

Even in those areas where the Government has retained its popular, conservative instincts, on crime, illegal immigration and the woke revolution, it is failing to do enough. The Prime Minister should be doing a lot more to empower Priti Patel, to give her the tools to truly reform police practices, to redeploy resources and to visibly change policing, as New York so famously did in the 1990s. Instead, cash is being squandered on HS2, and we are left with this week’s gimmicks.

Perhaps most damagingly of all, the Government is failing to make the case for capitalism. It never explains how growth comes from the private sector, from entrepreneurship, from private capital and innovation. Instead, its model appears to be based entirely on state spending and green energy. For years, Johnson would cite Ibn Khaldun, the Arab sage who invented supplyside economics. Today, all of this is forgotten: we can apparently hike corporation tax and National Insurance contributions and it supposedly has no impact on jobs or on growth.

The implications, of course, are that high taxes, nationalisation, central planning and money printing work, and that the magic money tree does exist: why, then, vote Tory? Why not Labour next time, if there is no meaningful difference? The Tories are relinquishing space on the Right for a start-up political party: a new Ukip at even 3 per cent of the vote would cripple Conservative hopes and undo the great Northern realignment.

There is still hope. Johnson has just shown he has the capacity to defy the consensus: the technocrats are reeling after he ordered a much more liberal regime for those who come into contact with Covid carriers from next month. He needs an equally urgent course shift on his domestic agenda. Above all, he must regain confidence in the popular conservatism that ushered him into power.