The Tories have wasted their time in power

The Conservative Party has drifted away from its grassroots, returning to managing national decline

You might think The Daily Telegraph leader column falls from the heavens, etched on tablets in gothic font, but it is in fact written by a team of anonymous journalists under the wise eye of the editor. I was part of that team for ten years. Last weekend, I stepped down.

Don’t worry, I haven’t had a better offer from the Beano – I’m staying put to concentrate on sketches, columns and my dog’s Instagram. I was always an odd fit, not long out of the Labour Party, and I wrote some things I disagreed with. But it was to the paper’s advantage that I was so active in communist circles. The comrades practise “democratic centralism”: you argue ferociously in private, but once the position has been decided, you back it to the hilt in public.

Working at a centre-right paper of record during a period of Tory power, I had the privilege of seeing history unfold close-up. What I witnessed was a revolution – in the literal sense of that word. Many changes, but we’re back where we started.

In 2013, the choice was David Cameron versus Ed Miliband – centrist versus centrist. Today it’s Rishi Sunak versus Sir Keir Starmer. No difference. Toryism has made little mark on the country. I’ll give you Universal Credit and academies as successful reforms, but the NHS remains a monolith, our borders are porous, the BBC untouched and taxes too high. If Gordon Brown had won in 2010, he, too, would have waged a war on carbon and, in time, legalised gay marriage, which Cameron chalked up as one of his proudest moments.

Today, the strongest critics of the sexual revolution are found in the SNP – and, in retrospect, the legislation proved definitively that the Conservatives are not conservative. They are a machine for putting not ideas into power but people, specifically the upper middle-classes, whose values are not a philosophical constant but dance with the times. In the 2010s, they were Blairites.

That put them at loggerheads with the grassroots, who either do have a philosophy or come from a different social perspective, hence I wrote many a leader protesting against taxes on the self-employed or wind farms blighting the countryside. The revolt always bubbling beneath the surface was Europe, and the assumption until the last minute was that the status quo would prevail. An editor, no longer of this parish, once gave me some career advice. Stop writing flattering articles about Ukip, he said, “Britain is never going to leave the EU.”

Brexit is the one material difference the Tories have made. But they didn’t want to do it. Cameron triggered a referendum expecting to win; many of the Tories who campaigned for Brexit expected to lose, so they had no plan for making it work. Sunak’s new Northern Ireland Protocol deal is meant to clear up the dodgy agreement left by Boris Johnson, which was only necessary because of the mess he inherited from Theresa May. One can see the Tories as a Russian doll of failed prime ministers, one imprisoned inside the other’s decisions. But here’s the twist: Starmer can only beat the Tories by copying them. Mad, isn’t it?

Politics is more personal and unpleasant than I can ever remember, but on all the major issues, from Covid to Ukraine, the parties are largely in agreement, back to chasing the consensus. Plus ça change. Miliband tried to triangulate Cameron on immigration; Cameron copied Blair; and Blair imitated Thatcher. Nor is it a solely British disease. Joe Biden differs from Donald Trump in many ways, but he has also withdrawn from the Muslim world, urged businesses to repatriate, even cracked down on illegal immigration – and Trump would have responded every bit as strongly to the Russian invasion as his successor did.

The invasion that seemed impossible last February now looks inevitable, not only under Vladimir Putin’s leadership but any regime that felt obliged to compensate for the humiliating break-up of the Soviet Union (Boris Yeltsin tried something similar in Chechnya). When you’re young, you have faith in the power of movements to change things, even hope you might be a “Great Man” yourself someday. As you get older, you realise the greatest forces operate upon politicians, like technology or disease, not the other way around. It is very difficult to impose your will on history, to defy context or contingency.

Brexit blew up the Cameron Conservative Party. Then Covid blew up Brexit. And the Tories have returned, with an almost audible sigh of relief, to the management of national decline. The good news is that I’ve also seen the disenchanted grassroots build an ecosystem separate from the party, with its own online media, even a TV station. Aware that they can’t flourish in modern British culture, Conservatives are dropping out of it, writing their own books, making their own documentaries. I hope that their focus will gradually shift away from politics and towards the life that flourishes beyond, providing the richness of perspective one finds in a good newspaper.

Each edition of The Telegraph is as long as a novel, and in these pages you’ll find arguments for tax cuts, yes, but also cricket, crosswords, cartoons, reviews, fashion and tips for surviving the salad shortage. The Left makes politics its god. Mature conservatives are interested in politics only in so far as it defends the things they love.