It was one of the largest political rallies ever held in Britain, addressed by a hugely charismatic leader, pointing to a big structural change in UK politics. No, it wasn’t Churchill, or even Thatcher or Blair, let alone Johnson. The star speaker was Narendra Modi, the controversial Hindu nationalist prime minister of India, who packed Wembley stadium with more than 60,000 of the British-Indian community on a cold November evening in 2015, soon after his first landslide election a year earlier.
The Modi rally has prophetic significance in retrospect. Modi was introduced by David Cameron, fresh from his own recent election triumph, who lauded the Indian prime minister alongside the huge contribution of Britain’s Indian community to our society and economy.
“I hope, Prime Minister Modi, you can see what I see every day,” said Cameron. “British Indians putting the ‘Great’ into ‘Great Britain.’” According to one account, “after a shout-out to the Indian state of Gujarat, to which a majority in the audience belonged [and which is Modi’s home state—he was chief minister there before entering national politics], he had to stop for at least 10 seconds due to the ecstatic response. The same with his promise that a British Indian “may soon be prime minister of the UK.”
Well, that may indeed soon happen. Rishi Sunak was first elected just before the Modi rally in 2015. Seven years later, he is competing strongly for Cameron’s old job.
It is indisputably true that in terms of race and gender, Cameron transformed the Conservative Party. When he became Tory leader in 2005, all seven contenders were white and male. They were drawn from a party whose MPs included just 17 women and only two from ethnic minorities. Now those figures are 87 and 22. In this leadership contest, of the 11 initial candidates, more than half were from ethnic minority backgrounds and four were women. The next leader will now definitely be either a woman or from an ethnic minority background.
This follows the systematic promotion of ethnic minority and women candidates through Cameron’s “A-list” initiative after 2005. It also of course reflects the changing social make-up of Britain, including the rise of second-generation immigrants from successful yet socially and economically conservative families, who prize education and the established professions, including politics. They were only too willing to embrace the Conservative Party—once it embraced them.
This all makes uncomfortable reading on the left, particularly for those who think it is somehow unnatural for ethnic minority leaders to be Tory or who fail to understand properly why they might be. Labour has still to elect either a woman or an ethnic minority candidate as its leader, whereas the Tories could soon be on to their third woman or second ethnic minority leader since Benjamin Disraeli in the 19th century, whose Jewish parents converted to Anglicanism.
It was Disraeli who inspired the term “One Nation” as the unifying yet reassuringly vague slogan for an elite-led, fairly nationalistic Conservative Party which aspires to be England’s majority party, and has mostly succeeded in being so. The Tories have done it again and again on Disraeli’s formula of co-opting the leaders of rising economic elites, and proclaiming a party representative of a wide range of elite opinion to be national. Compared to other European right-wing parties, the Tories are unusual in the sense of genuinely welcoming those from all backgrounds, yet in the cause of an economic and social creed whose basis is conventionally conservative and nationalistic, especially post-Brexit.
It is deeply ironic that the term “One Nation” is itself now too freighted with “Remainer centrism” to be adopted by most of today’s contenders for the Tory leadership. Only Tom Tugendhat owned it, the one serious white male contender. Yet electing a Winchester and Oxford-educated son of Indian immigrants would be four square in the Disraeli One Nation tradition. It was a radical philosophy then and radical now—just not necessarily left wing, or even centrist.
It also gives the Tories a bold reform narrative simply by virtue of who they are. Today’s Conservative Party abounds with talented role models from ethnic minority backgrounds, however loosely connected they are to the challenges facing most ethnic minority families.
It would be a mistake for Labour and the left to minimise the political potency of this new form of One Nation Toryism. Long after the dust has settled on the unseemly—almost incredible—public spats between Sunak, Truss, Mordaunt and Badenoch, the picture will endure of the four of them as a morality tale of the make-up of modern Britain. They represent a form of One Nation Conservatism which, however Tory and nationalistic, is authentically modern British.
The problem for the Tories is the other side of Disraeli’s One Nation coin, which says that the governing elite should be competent, especially as regards economic management. The argument for an elite-led party is that it knows how to rule effectively. Er, yes, well.
