The Conservatives are telling themselves comforting fairy tales

Why the natural party of government is stuck in an opposition mindset.

As a UK citizen, it’s refreshing not to care about the Conservative Party.

Their current leadership contest will not decide the next Prime Minister. I don’t have to worry that the next madcap policy idea to come spurting out of a candidate’s mouth has any immediate danger of becoming actual government legislation. I no longer feel the need to apologise for the people running my country.

The Conservatives continue to demonstrate that they don’t care either.

They don’t seem to care about diagnosing the root causes of why they were handed the worst defeat in nearly 200 years. They don’t seem to care about creating a policy platform that actually gives them a fighting chance of regaining voters’ trust. They don’t seem to care about whether the next leader of the Conservative Party looks or sounds like a future Prime Minister.

We know they don’t care very much because of the two candidates they have chosen to put forward to the Conservative Party membership in the final stage of the leadership contest.

Conservative MPs have whittled down the initial pool of six candidates down to Robert Jenrick and Kemi Badenoch. Both represent the right wing of the Conservative Party, with all of the candidates who might have stood a chance of offering a more moderate platform now comprehensively eliminated.

Jenrick and Badenoch are right-wing in subtly different ways. Jenrick appears to be adopting more of a nativist, anti-immigrant right-wing platform. He’s the candidate that the Conservative membership will pick if they believe the best way to winning back power is to out-Farage Nigel Farage, and therefore chase after the votes they lost to Reform.

Badenoch meanwhile is more economically and culturally right-wing. She’s shown no hesitation in walking towards massive culture war battles on race, gender and the so-called ‘war on woke’. She has her feet planted firmly in the Conservative tradition that says the state is overstuffed with woke bureaucrats who are preventing the UK from realising their true growth potential (more on this later). If you want to understand the narratives that define Badenoch’s campaign, I’d suggest you should start with these three words: rewire the state.

The nature of the UK’s electoral system means that when parties lose badly, the route back to power is often long and difficult. Having been reduced to a rump of 120 MPs (compared to Labour’s 400+), the Conservatives’ route back to power is arguably less of a journey and more of an odyssey.

Some Conservative MPs and conservative-leaning commentators have speculated that the Tory Party can do this in one Parliamentary term. After all, Keir Starmer took a Labour Party which, back in 2019, had just suffered its worst defeat in 80 years and delivered the party an unprecedented Parliamentary majority only four years later.

But such a massive reversal of fortune is dependent on the Conservatives being able to offer an honest diagnosis of why they lost so badly and what they need to do to become electorally appealing once more.

It’s not apparent that either Badenoch or Jenrick can provide this diagnosis. Instead, both candidates have decided to hide behind comforting stories that seek to soothe the Conservatives’ collective ego.

We weren’t Conservative enough

The first comforting story that the remaining Conservative MPs have decided to tell themselves is that the British electorate rejected them because they were too left-wing.

Both Jenrick and Badenoch are promoting a version of this narrative.

Jenrick appears to believe that, despite the Conservatives promising endless gimmicks to stop illegal boat crossing and cut immigration (such as the plan to offshore illegal migrants to Rwanda), the British people didn’t think that the Conservatives were tough enough on immigration.

This is an oversimplification. Most voters appear to have rejected the Conservatives not because their policies on immigration failed some kind of right-wing sniff test, but because they didn’t believe that the Conservatives possessed the necessary competence to actually deliver on their immigration promises.

While the last Conservative government liked to act tough on immigration, too few of its policies ever seemed actually to deal with the root of the problem. The small boats kept coming. Hotels continued to fill up with asylum seekers. Immigration continued to rise, even though cutting immigration had been a core tenet of Brexit.

Badenoch’s diagnosis is similar but, as I explained above, is more rooted in the cultural failings of the Conservative Party. Badenoch’s campaign is named Renewal 2030. Visit her campaign website and you’ll see a diagnosis that reads like this

“In Government, we lost sight of what Conservatism is. We talked right, but governed left. We thought we could be managerially better than the other side. We forgot who we are and what we were winning for.”

Again, this doesn’t chime with most people’s lived experience of actually living under a Conservative government. Whether it was the hardcore Brexiteers who refused to back Theresa May’s Brexit deal or the mini-budget that spooked financial markets and immolated Liz Truss’s reputation, the last nine years saw the Conservatives inflict all manner of social and economic change on the British public in the name of right-wing ideological purity.

Badenoch’s diagnosis glides over events like the COVID-19 pandemic, where the Conservatives were forced to go against their political instincts and preside over the biggest overnight expansion of the state in living memory.

We need a smaller state

Linked closely to the idea that the Conservatives weren’t conservative enough while in government is the assertion that the best way to fix the UK’s woes is to cut the size of the state.

Once again I’d point you to the writings of Kemi Badenoch here (boy, do I know how to have fun) for a glimpse into current Conservative thinking.

Badenoch has put her name to a new long essay, Conservatism in Crisis: The Rise of the Bureaucratic Class.

The essay argues that British society is being stifled by - yep, you guessed it - a shadowy bureaucratic class. The essay argues that

“The bureaucratic class derives much of their income, or more widely, their justification, from government, through state spending but also an ever-growing regulatory state. They are very different from the market class of entrepreneurs and general market-focused workers.”

Jenrick has been banging the drum for a smaller state too. Writing for the website Conservative Home last month, Jenrick argued:

“Rather than raising taxes to fund a larger state, we need to shrink the state to suit a lower tax burden, restoring the incentives for companies to grow and invest, and for people to take risks and work hard.

Some of this can be done with a relatively light touch, addressing cliff edges within the tax system to avoid absurd marginal rates. But we will also need to look hard at the size of the state.

I’ve already set out my ambition to slash the number of civil servants to pre-Brexit levels. We must also make the most of our Brexit freedoms to secure our competitive advantages in areas like financial services and life sciences by building a leaner, more entrepreneurial state.”

Try telling all this to voters.

One of the multiple reasons why the voters decided to reject the Tories at the ballot box is that they felt that the state wasn’t working for them anymore.

The last two Prime Ministers to win comfortable Parliamentary majorities - Boris Johnson and Keir Starmer - did so by promising the exact opposite: that the state needed to step to solve many of the country’s endemic problems.

Whether it’s building new hospitals, fixing the NHS, cleaning up the water supply or ending the seemingly endless train strikes, the tilt towards Labour in the last election is a reflection of the fact that a lot of voters wanted the government to take a bigger role in their lives, not a smaller one.

Rather than ‘renewing’ the Conservative Party, Jenrick and Badenoch are repeating tired cliches which say that it’s only by cutting the size of the state that Britain’s true potential can be unleashed.

The problem with this thesis has been proven time and time again by recent public inquiries. Both the COVID-19 inquiry and the inquiry into the Grenfell Tower fire have demonstrated that Conservative attempts to shrink the size of the state were at least partially responsible for the state’s inability to fully protect its most vulnerable citizens in times of crisis.-

Labour are terrible

This is the most comforting story that the Conservatives have tried to tell themselves - that Labour are already proving themselves to be terrible as a governing party and that the moment will arise when the Conservatives can swoop in and restore the natural political order.

This isn’t entirely delusional thinking. It is true that the voters have a tendency to re-elect Conservative governments more often than they re-elect Labour ones: there’s a reason why the Conservatives are often referred to as the ‘natural party of government’.

So unaccustomed are the Tories to losing elections, that the historian Tim Bale has compared them to a

“…disappointed middle-aged wife whose husband’s just run off with his PA and thinks, “Well, give it three or four months and when he needs his socks darned and a homecooked meal, he’ll come crawling back, begging for forgiveness”.”

This quote from Bale actually refers to the last time the Conservatives were forced from power in 1997 but it’s a sentiment that still rings true in 2024. The Conservatives behave as if they can’t quite believe that voters had the temerity to…y’know…vote for someone else.

It’s true that Keir Starmer’s Labour government has gotten off to a rocky start. But the the Conservatives are able to soothe their egos with the hostile coverage that Labour is getting from a handful of Tory-supporting newspapers. Even on its worst days, this Labour government still manages to provide more stability and competence than its predecessor (and no, that stupid scandal around gifts and donors doesn’t count).

We’re also living in an age where two-party politics is once again breaking down. It won’t be sufficient for the Conservatives to just wait for Labour to fail. The party also haemorrhaged votes to the Reform Party and, more significantly, to the Liberal Democrats in whole swathes of the south-west.

Ironically, even as it gloats over the problems Labour is encountering in government, the Conservative Party shows no sign of embarking on the hard-thinking necessary to win back the votes they lost to not one, but two centre-left parties.

If the Tories continue to cling to these narratives, it will merely entrench their opposition mindset. Parties that are destined to stay in opposition for a long time after exhibit certain characteristics.

Parties destined for opposition like to imagine that voters will just wake up and realise that the other lot are wicked/rotten/socialist; they don’t like care to make the argument for why they deserve power in the first place.

Parties destined for opposition love to luxuriate in their own moral and ideological superiority (think of Labour under Jeremy Corbyn in the middle of the last decade); they don’t understand that most voters don’t see political divides through an ideological lens.

Perhaps most importantly, parties destined for opposition tend to elect leaders who tell them what they want to hear, not what they need to hear.

No matter which candidate wins the Tory leadership election in a few weeks time, it’s become apparent the Conservatives are exhibiting all three of the characteristics I’ve just listed.

Neither Badenoch nor Jenrick can offer hard truths. They seem content to trade in comforting fairy tales.