The last time I saw my cousin, the former Tory MP Danny Kruger, I found myself trying to ginger him up a bit. I said, which I thought then and thought now – and which I can’t think it is betraying a confidence to say publicly – that the low state of the Conservative party was a bummer for those who sat on its benches, but also an opportunity for the likes of him.
After years of drift, venality, lurching ideological changes and idea-free opportunism, they had the chance to rebuild. Danny looked well placed to take a leading part in that project. Tory intellectuals are thin on the ground these days, and he is one. He’s certainly the only current MP who once got sacked as a candidate for quoting Schumpeter.
My view, you might think, will be clouded by familial affection. It is not, at least, clouded by ideological fellow-travelling. Danny’s views on almost everything are very different from my own. But I respect how he has arrived at them. He’s a scholar of Edmund Burke, he’s a committed Christian, and he has thought hard about the ideas that underpin his worldview. There’s fibre there. He can construct an argument and he speaks excellently in the House. If you stand him alongside most of the current senior Tories – the wretched stunt-prone Jenrick, the floundering lost-her-homework Badenoch, the misnamed Cleverley – he looks like Isaiah Berlin.
Anyway, he hem-hemmed a bit and looked flattered, and muttered noncommittally, and we made nice small talk and gave our children lunch… and blow me down, about a week later he defected to Reform. So much for my Nostradamus-like powers. And so much, I fear, for the Conservative and Unionist Party if its brains are leaving the building.
As well as being a splendidly pragmatic election-winning machine, the Tories have traditionally been a party of ideas: Keith Joseph, Michael Oakeshott, Roger Scruton and co provided intellectual ballast to their politics. You might not agree with a small-state, free-marketeering, individualist, keeping-hold-of-nurse-for-fear-of-finding-something worse philosophy, and you might poke holes in its compromises and contradictions, but there were ideas there – and the party was a vehicle for those ideas.
What ideas is the party a vehicle for now? To judge by yesterday’s interview with Katie Lam— billed as a ‘rising star’ of the party — not all that much. Ms Lam told the Sunday Times that not only is she keen on getting rid of illegal immigrants (hard to find someone against that, these days) but she wants to kick out the legal type too.
‘There are,’ she complained, ‘a large number of people in this country who came here legally, but in effect shouldn’t have been able to do so. It’s not the fault of the individuals who came here, they just shouldn’t have been able to do so. They will also need to go home. What that will leave is a mostly but not entirely culturally coherent group of people.’
It’s not the dismayingly blood-and-soil kicker there, mostly, that I consider the problem. It’s the blithe idea that if you don’t like a law, you can change it retrospectively. I’ve heard about the convention that no parliament can bind its successor, but this is ridiculous. How far back do we go? Are the fates of our fellow citizens, their parents, spouses and grandparents, to be governed entirely by Katie Lam’s cultural homogeneity vibes test? Are we to consider no more than reasonable, now, the view of the Daily Express’s reporter Christian Calgie, who recently took 24 hours to apologise after saying he’d like to see the Birmingham-born MP Zarah Sultana deported?
As the anti-racist think-tanker Sunder Katwala noticed, Lam told parliament a month ago: ‘We can feel great personal sympathy for such people [i.e. those who have indefinite leave to remain but she now wants to kick out], but our primary, indeed our only, fundamental responsibility is not fairness to foreign nationals but fairness to the British people. It is our sacred duty to put them first, and to act in their interests and their interests alone.’
Sad-face, in other words, but tough titty. Legal and treaty commitments to foreigners don’t count, even if we’ve already made them, because ‘our people’, however defined, come first. It doesn’t take more than a second or two of cogitation to recognise that as a stated policy this is going to make it very hard indeed for foreign governments to trust us and foreign companies to do business with us; not to mention tangling the courts in any number of well-founded legal challenges. It is, in other words, not simply immoral but just plain thick.
This is not simply immoral but just plain thick
So, too, is her account of the ‘international rules-based order’, which most of us will regard in broad outline as a good thing. She told the Sunday Times that: ‘Put simply, the international rules-based order is based on the idea that everyone would want to be nice to each other post-war. The reality is that’s not true and loads of people will exploit that generosity. If we’re not going to stand up for ourselves, we will lose the most precious things that we have.’
Counter-point: the rules-based order was put in place not because we assumed everyone would want to be nice to each-other. It was put in place precisely to make sure that they would find it difficult to be the opposite. It was put in place, among other things, to help people like those of Katie Lam’s ancestors who fled the Holocaust and settled in the UK.
Deciding that rules, and laws, and norms, and commitments are not things to be changed and renegotiated and argued over but things simply to be ignored if you don’t like them – as seems to be the fashion all over the world these days – seems to me to lead us in a very dark direction indeed.
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