Category Archives: Conservative Party

Lead or Go. Still discussing May



The conservative weekly "The Spectator" is influential - and widely read - in Conservative Party circles, so it can hardly be good news for May that its well-connected political editor, James Forsyth, has written the cover story under the stark demand that she "Lead or Go".

This debate doesn't seem to be getting any quieter, even as May is in China trying to secure trade deals.  The BBC's Laura Kuenssberg commented on the febrile atmosphere in Westminster on this morning's Today programme (here, go to 1:09:06 for Nick Robinson's start), noting that Tory MPs were daily changing their minds about May.

The problem for Tory MPs, as I noted below and here, is their risk-averse caution.  They don't want May but they hate the uncertainty of the alternative.  May's leadership is flawed from top to bottom, but the parliamentary part she leads is riven through and through with factional strife, resulting in a ghastly stasis that is tipping the party into a state of catatonic inaction.

Michael Oakeshott was the pre-eminent 20th century philosopher of conservatism, and his analysis of 1951 might bear some re-considering.  He described conservatives attitudes thus:

In political activity, then, men sail a boundless and bottomless sea; there is neither harbour for shelter nor floor for anchorage, neither starting-place nor appointed destination. The enterprise is to keep afloat on an even keel; the sea is both friend and enemy

Tory MPs today might want to consider whether they have taken to heart his final injunction:

The seamanship consists in using the resources of a traditional manner of behaviour in order to make a friend of every hostile occasion.

They are certainly facing a hostile occasion, but don't yet seem to have secured the resources to make a friend of it.  Very unconservative.











Lead or Go. Still discussing May



The conservative weekly "The Spectator" is influential - and widely read - in Conservative Party circles, so it can hardly be good news for May that its well-connected political editor, James Forsyth, has written the cover story under the stark demand that she "Lead or Go".

This debate doesn't seem to be getting any quieter, even as May is in China trying to secure trade deals.  The BBC's Laura Kuenssberg commented on the febrile atmosphere in Westminster on this morning's Today programme (here, go to 1:09:06 for Nick Robinson's start), noting that Tory MPs were daily changing their minds about May.

The problem for Tory MPs, as I noted below and here, is their risk-averse caution.  They don't want May but they hate the uncertainty of the alternative.  May's leadership is flawed from top to bottom, but the parliamentary part she leads is riven through and through with factional strife, resulting in a ghastly stasis that is tipping the party into a state of catatonic inaction.

Michael Oakeshott was the pre-eminent 20th century philosopher of conservatism, and his analysis of 1951 might bear some re-considering.  He described conservatives attitudes thus:

In political activity, then, men sail a boundless and bottomless sea; there is neither harbour for shelter nor floor for anchorage, neither starting-place nor appointed destination. The enterprise is to keep afloat on an even keel; the sea is both friend and enemy

Tory MPs today might want to consider whether they have taken to heart his final injunction:

The seamanship consists in using the resources of a traditional manner of behaviour in order to make a friend of every hostile occasion.

They are certainly facing a hostile occasion, but don't yet seem to have secured the resources to make a friend of it.  Very unconservative.











May survives another turbulent week. Again.



Image result for theresa mayLike Mark Twain’s death, reports of Theresa May’s demise have been greatly exaggerated. Unlike the legendary writer’s death rumours, however, these are more frequent and relentless. Quite how a person of little obvious political skill or charisma, and seemingly little personal support, has managed to soldier on in Britain’s highest political office during a period of more or less consistent crisis, will be as much a matter for political psychologists as historians in the future.

For now, it is enough to occupy ourselves with the return of that perennial British favourite, “Will Theresa Survive?” When she’s not dealing with a crisis of her own making, be it a misjudged election, a botched reshuffle, or the failure to call yet another errant minister to account, Britain’s accidental Prime Minister is usually to be found fire-fighting another round of leadership questions. Or not. The odd thing about these regular leadership issues is just how little we hear from the central figure, Mrs. May herself. Questions are asked, searing articles are penned, a sense of impending crisis is adopted, and some poor soul is shuffled in front of the cameras to make whatever limited case he or she can for the prime minister before the crisis seems to pass. The lady herself, with her pursed lips and dull, thudding phraseology, is nowhere to be seen.

Mrs. May has managed to prove the success of what is in reality a very simple political strategy. Just keep soldiering on. What is often underestimated in analyses of politicians in their insulated environment is just how little radicalism or courage they are willing to show. Caution is the best observed watchword in any political town, and no more so than in Britain’s scarcely beating political heart of Westminster. Most leaders subjected to the sort of crisis-ridden term that Theresa May has had, coupled with the relentless criticism, would have decided to either try and lance the boil with a leadership election ( a tactic once tried by John Major, which saw him re-elected but notably failed to do much lancing) or simply stand down from sheer weariness and stress. Not for nothing is Mrs. May known as the “Maybot”, a term coined by the Guardian’s political sketch writer John Crace. She really does act like some advanced form of AI which has been programmed to go through the motions of Brexit negotiations and will not be distracted from this key task by mere notions of human frailty. Only utter destruction will stop the Maybot in its tracks.

Whether such utter destruction is just round the corner is not yet fully established, but there have once again been rumblings of discontent in Westminster about her leadership. Newspapers report that the chairman of the Conservative backbenchers committee (known as the “1922” committee after the seminal moment in that year when Tory MPs ousted former war leader David Lloyd George) has received nearly enough letters from MPs to spark a leadership election. Commentators have also been dusting off their familiar critiques of the Prime Minister – that she lacks vision, is indecisive, has no idea of what she is doing vis a vis Brexit and cannot control her ministerial colleagues. And her two principal cabinet colleagues, the Foreign Secretary and the Chancellor of the Exchequer, have once again been sparring in public and producing their own versions of government policy.

There are few certainties about any of this other than that Mrs. May will never step down voluntarily, whatever the pressure. When you’ve weathered the sort of disastrous and self-inflicted election defeat that she has, and moreover proved manifestly and publicly incapable of clear leadership on the central issue facing Britain today (Brexit), and still insist on staying in office, you can guarantee nothing else is going to come along to shake that extraordinary self-belief.

The issue is less about Mrs. May now and more about her critics and putative rivals. It isn’t just caution that holds Conservatives back from igniting a leadership election whilst being in a precarious minority government. Both sides are fearful of the alternative. So-called “Remainers” see Mrs. May in all her awkwardness as palpably more acceptable than the flamboyant charlatan Boris Johnson, once again a likely prospect to triumph in a leadership election. The “hard Brexiters” meanwhile worry about the outside prospect of a Remain leader such as Home Secretary Amber Rudd or Defence Secretary Gavin Williamson. There is also the chance that they know the political damage that could well come with the sort of “hard Brexit” they are advocating, and prefer someone else to take the fall.

It is certainly conceivable that Theresa May could well still be prime minister when the Brexit deal – in whatever form – is signed and sealed in 2019. But Remainers in particular might want to consider the advantage of letting full blooded Brexiters have their day in dealing with the turbulent negotiations of the Treaty they campaigned so fulsomely for. Trying to limit the treaty, or make it look like we haven’t really left, may sound like a comforting strategy, but it will leave Remainers on the defensive and give the hard Brexiters a stick with which to beat them for many years to come. If the referendum result is to have any chance of lancing the anti-EU boil and bringing some harmony to the Tory party, it may be best to ditch Mrs. May and give Boris and his ragtag army of true believers full reign.

May survives another turbulent week. Again.



Image result for theresa mayLike Mark Twain’s death, reports of Theresa May’s demise have been greatly exaggerated. Unlike the legendary writer’s death rumours, however, these are more frequent and relentless. Quite how a person of little obvious political skill or charisma, and seemingly little personal support, has managed to soldier on in Britain’s highest political office during a period of more or less consistent crisis, will be as much a matter for political psychologists as historians in the future.

For now, it is enough to occupy ourselves with the return of that perennial British favourite, “Will Theresa Survive?” When she’s not dealing with a crisis of her own making, be it a misjudged election, a botched reshuffle, or the failure to call yet another errant minister to account, Britain’s accidental Prime Minister is usually to be found fire-fighting another round of leadership questions. Or not. The odd thing about these regular leadership issues is just how little we hear from the central figure, Mrs. May herself. Questions are asked, searing articles are penned, a sense of impending crisis is adopted, and some poor soul is shuffled in front of the cameras to make whatever limited case he or she can for the prime minister before the crisis seems to pass. The lady herself, with her pursed lips and dull, thudding phraseology, is nowhere to be seen.

Mrs. May has managed to prove the success of what is in reality a very simple political strategy. Just keep soldiering on. What is often underestimated in analyses of politicians in their insulated environment is just how little radicalism or courage they are willing to show. Caution is the best observed watchword in any political town, and no more so than in Britain’s scarcely beating political heart of Westminster. Most leaders subjected to the sort of crisis-ridden term that Theresa May has had, coupled with the relentless criticism, would have decided to either try and lance the boil with a leadership election ( a tactic once tried by John Major, which saw him re-elected but notably failed to do much lancing) or simply stand down from sheer weariness and stress. Not for nothing is Mrs. May known as the “Maybot”, a term coined by the Guardian’s political sketch writer John Crace. She really does act like some advanced form of AI which has been programmed to go through the motions of Brexit negotiations and will not be distracted from this key task by mere notions of human frailty. Only utter destruction will stop the Maybot in its tracks.

Whether such utter destruction is just round the corner is not yet fully established, but there have once again been rumblings of discontent in Westminster about her leadership. Newspapers report that the chairman of the Conservative backbenchers committee (known as the “1922” committee after the seminal moment in that year when Tory MPs ousted former war leader David Lloyd George) has received nearly enough letters from MPs to spark a leadership election. Commentators have also been dusting off their familiar critiques of the Prime Minister – that she lacks vision, is indecisive, has no idea of what she is doing vis a vis Brexit and cannot control her ministerial colleagues. And her two principal cabinet colleagues, the Foreign Secretary and the Chancellor of the Exchequer, have once again been sparring in public and producing their own versions of government policy.

There are few certainties about any of this other than that Mrs. May will never step down voluntarily, whatever the pressure. When you’ve weathered the sort of disastrous and self-inflicted election defeat that she has, and moreover proved manifestly and publicly incapable of clear leadership on the central issue facing Britain today (Brexit), and still insist on staying in office, you can guarantee nothing else is going to come along to shake that extraordinary self-belief.

The issue is less about Mrs. May now and more about her critics and putative rivals. It isn’t just caution that holds Conservatives back from igniting a leadership election whilst being in a precarious minority government. Both sides are fearful of the alternative. So-called “Remainers” see Mrs. May in all her awkwardness as palpably more acceptable than the flamboyant charlatan Boris Johnson, once again a likely prospect to triumph in a leadership election. The “hard Brexiters” meanwhile worry about the outside prospect of a Remain leader such as Home Secretary Amber Rudd or Defence Secretary Gavin Williamson. There is also the chance that they know the political damage that could well come with the sort of “hard Brexit” they are advocating, and prefer someone else to take the fall.

It is certainly conceivable that Theresa May could well still be prime minister when the Brexit deal – in whatever form – is signed and sealed in 2019. But Remainers in particular might want to consider the advantage of letting full blooded Brexiters have their day in dealing with the turbulent negotiations of the Treaty they campaigned so fulsomely for. Trying to limit the treaty, or make it look like we haven’t really left, may sound like a comforting strategy, but it will leave Remainers on the defensive and give the hard Brexiters a stick with which to beat them for many years to come. If the referendum result is to have any chance of lancing the anti-EU boil and bringing some harmony to the Tory party, it may be best to ditch Mrs. May and give Boris and his ragtag army of true believers full reign.

AS Politics: Party Divisions – the Conservative Party

The problem with examining Conservative Party divisions is that we tend to still be using out of date terminology.  The party has moved on from a Thatcherite/One Nation division (if it ever really existed in one) not least because the times have changed.  No Conservative leader seriously disputes the need to maintain Thatcherism's principal legacy of a privatised economy and lower taxes (a legacy that even social democrats like Tony Blair undertook to essentially preserve).  The headline issue that split the Conservatives in the post-Thatcher years was Europe, although there was also debate around liberal versus conservative social attitudes and the extent to which public services like health and education should be submitted to the rigours of free market medicine.

The key to determining the direction of the Conservative party lies with its leaders and the best way of understanding Conservative divisions is probably via them.  Unlike its main rivals, the Conservatives are driven to an extraordinary degree by the men and women who lead it.  While Conservative grassroots members are broadly right-wing, often putting them at odds with more liberal minded leaders, they are also fundamentally loyal.  They do not have pretensions to directing the parliamentary party, even if they now expect a say in how it is led (although such a say is rare - only Iain Duncan Smith and David Cameron became leaders as a result of a grassroots vote).

Party historians date the Conservative Party back to either Robert Peel or William Pitt the Younger.  Pitt embodied the free trade philosophy that has remained part of the party's policy DNA (leading to a substantial internal divide at the beginning of the twentieth century) while Peel was an early social reformer.  Peel's cabinet included William Gladstone while his backbench MPs included Benjamin Disraeli.  Gladstone took his economic liberalism to the Liberal Party after the repeal of the Corn Laws split the party, while Disraeli eventually came to articulate what he called a One Nation vision for the Conservatives.

One Nation Conservatism - a somewhat inchoate, pragmatic blend of paternalism and specific government action to benefit the working poor in the interests of national harmony - came to dominate the Conservative Party for much of the twentieth century.  However, it was encountering problems under Edward Heath and it fell to Margaret Thatcher to provide something hitherto unknown for Conservatism - an ideology.  The liberal conservative Ian Gilmour had noted that "the wise Conservative travels light" but such lightness of travel wasn't benefiting them by the 70s, so Mrs. Thatcher brought back a form of Gladstonian liberalism in economic thought - essentially a promulgation of the virtues of the free market and private ownership - and married it with traditional Tory social conservatism.

Whilst opposed by liberal, or One Nation, Conservatives such as Gilmour on account of its negative impact upon working class communities (notably miners and traditional manufacturing workers), Thatcherism became the dominant Conservative ideology in the latter part of the 20th century.  Economic liberalism, in the form of a small state, low tax vision, was not seriously questioned although social attitudes did become a battleground between liberals and conservatives.

David Cameron became leader in 2005 and sought to modernise the Conservative brand without seriously changing its policies.  He coined the term "Big Society" for his 2010 election manifesto (an updated version of One Nation Conservatism), though in practice this amounted to little specific in terms of policy.  He also sought to focus more on 'Green" issues and social liberalism to soften the Conservative image; his embrace of gay marriage was a success for social liberals but put him at odds with a still significant socially conservative membership of his party.  He pursued some further devolution of powers away from Westminster, to a proposed "Northern Powerhouse" (the hobbyhorse of his key ally and Chancellor George Osborne) and the metro mayors elected last May - a lingering legacy.  There was also a feeling that his desire for a formal coalition with the Liberal Democrats was in part motivated by a need to have a liberal firewall against his own more right-wing back-benchers.  In government, however, he and Osborne found themselves nonetheless pursuing an austerity agenda in the light of the 2008 financial crisis that wouldn't have looked out of place under Mrs. Thatcher herself.

Like all Conservative leaders since Thatcher, Cameron was faced with a Europe problem, which he resolved by promising a referendum.  He can hardly have foreseen that this referendum would spell his own precipitate political end just a year after winning an independent majority for his party in the 2015 election.

And so we come to Theresa May.  Her speech on taking office seemed to mark the outlines of a form of One Nation Conservatism, and the 2017 Conservative manifesto - which more than many of its predecessors is the work of the leader's small coterie, notably co chief-of-staff Nick Timothy - seems to have embedded this further.  Characterised by some as "Red Toryism", May's manifesto actively promotes the idea that the state can be used to further the public good.  It talks of the "good that government can do" and rejects what it calls "the cult of selfish individualism". It wants public schools to set up state academies, promises to maintain the workers' rights that are currently embedded in EU law and even rejects the idea of ideology as "dangerous".

In her determination to use the state to protect workers and provide government oversight of businesses, May echoes some of the activist agenda of Disraeli (or more accurately his Home Secretary Richard Cross).  In identifying herself as the emblem of conservatism and thus the nation, the only person trusted to negotiate our exit from the European Union,  there are echoes of Stanley Baldwin's "Safety First" agenda in the 1930s, although they lack his sense of ease at the state of the country.

In the modern age of an expansive state, however, which has often been the target of Conservative determinations to reduce it, May has also arguably carved out a new brand of Conservatism.  One which seeks to utilise the state rather than attack it, and do so in order to widen the appeal of 21st century Conservatism to those who are not people of wealth or rank.  The so-called "just about managing" that she identified in her first speech.  Shorn of the Brexit veneer, she could be seen as the most left-wing Conservative premier yet.  This is why a High Tory like historian Andrew Roberts is so worried, as he argues in this piece, suggesting that she is not really a Tory at all. 

The Conservatives are the most pragmatic and flexible of democratic political parties.  It is one reason why they are still in business after more than two centuries.  How long lasting the May changes will be are of course dependent on the level of endorsement she gets from the electorate, and a couple of weeks before the election itself that isn't looking quite so rosy.