What will be Rishi Sunak’s political legacy, other than the terribly embarrassing thing that happened on July 4? Not free speech on campus: Sunak never got round to putting that law onto the statute book before the general election. Not the absurd age-related rolling smoking ban: ditto. Nor A-level reform. Nor the new law that was going to force convicts to appear in person for sentencing. Nor the Rwanda removals scheme for illegal migrants. All fell by the wayside in the Sunak dash to defeat.
Farage’s tanks will churn up whatever is left of the Tory lawn
There is a strong case for regarding something he did as chancellor as the one tangible thing to remember him for: minting a new 50 pence piece embossed with the slogan: ‘Diversity Built Britain.’ That such a canard of progressivism has a claim to totemic status in the short career arc of the last Conservative prime minister tells us a lot about the state of the party. Discounting the curious Liz Truss interregnum, all the Tory premiers since 2010 – and not merely the first – have deserved to be regarded as ‘heirs to Blair’. David Cameron was eclipsed by Theresa May in the wokery stakes. Johnson presided over unbelievably reckless immigration volumes and went gaga for Gaia.
No wonder a fifth of the voters who backed the pledge to ‘Get Brexit Done’ in 2019 (Brexit itself being an idea forced on the party, not masterminded by it) defected to Reform in July, with almost as many again opting to abstain. While there were always voices in the party speaking up for traditional Toryism, they never had the numbers to deliver it. As Nigel Farage woundingly observed, the Conservatives had long since turned into ‘a broad church with no religion’.
Now a new leader must take charge of a rump of 120 Tory MPs and recreate coherence. Either that or Farage’s tanks will churn up whatever is left of the Tory lawn on immigration, law and order, taxation, political correctness, free speech and plenty more.
Should James Cleverly or Tom Tugendhat emerge victorious from the leadership contest, then the flawed idea of fighting Labour and the Lib Dems for the supposed ‘centre ground’ will be reaffirmed and Farage can enjoy unlimited free lunches.
In the much more likely event of Robert Jenrick or Kemi Badenoch winning, then the Reform leader will have stiff competition in the race to harness in Britain the socially conservative flood tide that is running so strongly across the western world.
Jenrick is demanding that all Tory candidates from now on should subscribe to a list of ten basic principles including belief in the primacy of the nation state, the supremacy of parliamentary sovereignty over ‘international law’, the capacity of free market economics to generate prosperity, that mass migration must end and that prison works.
Thanks to the favouring in candidate selection processes of progressives with shallow roots in conservative thought post Michael Howard’s leadership, there are plenty of existing Tory MPs who would struggle with some of those. But as an office holder in a constituency association put it to me this week, one result of the extent of the landslide defeat is an upside prospect of the party winning 200 more seats at the next election. This means that the Cameron-Osborne ‘moderniser’ cohort could be marginalised.
As he put it: ‘You could say, isn’t it awful that half the parliamentary party are proto-Lib Dems; or you could say that it’s progress that we only have 60 proto-Lib Dems remaining. The absolute key is candidate selection for the next election. There is now a path to a much stauncher parliamentary party.’
Both Jenrick and Badenoch are keenly aware of the importance of reforming selection processes so that careerist carpet-baggers lacking any ideological ‘bottom’ are filtered out rather than handed plum seats. Such an exercise will not garner as many headlines as eye-catching policy shifts will. But it must be undertaken with gusto if this party is ever to ride again.
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