In far-off days, the Conservative party used to be conservative. The dictum of one of its great 19th-century leaders, Lord Salisbury, was: “Change, change, aren’t things bad enough already?”
A generation later, in the 1920s, Winston Churchill left the Liberals and rejoined the Conservatives—then often called the “Constitutional party”—claiming that stable, orderly, patriotic government was in jeopardy. Cheers, Mr Churchill!, a brilliant new book by Andrew Liddle about Churchill’s 14 years as MP for Dundee, includes his bitter tirades against Labour and Communist opponents in the 1922 election, when he was defeated in that heavily working-class Scottish city famous for its jute factories. This attack on them, including for being conscientious objectors in the First World War, gives a flavour: “A predatory and confiscatory programme fatal to the reviving prosperity of the country, inspired by class jealousy and the doctrines of envy, hatred and malice, is appropriately championed in Dundee by two candidates both of whom had to be shut up during the late war in order to prevent them further hampering the national defence.”
It is a different world today, when the Labour party begins its conference by singing the national anthem while Liz Truss’s “Conservative” government spooks the markets and provokes a run on the pound with its rabbit-out-of-a-hat £45bn of unfunded tax cuts.
The City now looks wistfully towards a Keir Starmer Labour government of orthodox economics freed from the latest revolutionary creeds emanating from right-wing think tanks at 55 Tufton Street, SW1, an address which strikes terror in moderately minded people much as 16 King Street, the Covent Garden headquarters of the old Communist party of Great Britain, did a century ago.
When did the Conservative party stop being conservative? Thatcher was the transitional leader. Before Thatcher in the 1980s, the Tories had either been successful in maintaining a regime which favoured them economically and socially, or when they failed, as under Attlee and his postwar Labour government, they rolled with the punches and sought to stabilise the new status quo as best they could when they returned to power. Thatcher was the first “conservative” leader who, following Wilson’s Labour governments, sought to reverse their progressive taxation and dismantle large parts of the public sector and welfare state.
Truss and Kwarteng have moved to a new level, turning against their immediate Tory predecessors and engaging in Maoist-style acts of destruction of state policy and institutions without a shred of conservative principle, in order to redistribute towards the plutocratic elite. The transitional moment for this destructive Maoism wasn’t Thatcher but Cummings and his successful Brexit campaign, which marked the watershed not only to post-conservatism but also to post-truth politics. For the first time in modern Tory politics, systematic Orwellian lying, previously associated with revolutionary movements, became its habit, because you couldn’t make a coherent argument for Brexit by telling the truth and deploying facts.
Which brings us to the latest lie: that borrowing tens of billions for tax cuts lavished on the better off will promote “growth”. There is not a shred of evidence for this, and plenty of evidence to the contrary once inflation, interest and mortgage rates, and inequality and poverty, shoot up in consequence.
Truss and her old Etonian chancellor, Kwasi Kwarteng—who is behaving like a subsidiary of the billionaire hedge fund managers who used to employ him—obviously know this. Or they wouldn’t have acted with such desperation to prevent the independent Office for Budget Responsibility from giving its fact-based verdict on the so-called “mini budget”, a fiscal event which was neither “mini” nor a “budget”. As Mark Carney, the former governor of the Bank of England, points out, the essence of a budget is that it is made up of numbers which add up.
How long can this Tory Maoism last? Almost certainly not beyond the general election due by January 2025 at the latest, given the 20-30 per cent Labour poll leads which have greeted the Truss “honeymoon”. But I doubt it can last even that long, because there are probably still enough conservative MPs in the Conservative party to call time on Truss and Kwarteng and install a non-revolutionary leader. Probably without letting Tory members have a say this time, for fear it might lead to a return of Boris Johnson.
For the strongest conservative principles among Tory MPs are that they should remain MPs and that their party should remain in government. In those respects, Truss and Kwarteng aren’t just Maoist; they are agents of the opposition, who need to be shut up in order to prevent them further advancing the destruction of the Conservative party. So I wouldn’t write off Rishi Sunak just yet.
