Nick Cohen Nick Cohen

People have had enough of the Tory right

Go back ten years and you could never imagine green campaigners greeting Michael Gove’s return to government with a mixture of contempt and despair. It feels like another age, but in the last decade Gove, Cameron and Osborne decided the only way to stop the Tory party remaining in opposition was to force it to come to terms with modern Britain.

‘Detoxifying the brand’ – to use their advertising agency jargon – meant Conservatives should stop giving the impression that ethnic minorities weren’t truly British. They should help all people, rather than just the comfortable. Most of all, Conservatives must stop being John Stuart Mill’s ‘Stupid Party,’ which resists new ideas merely because they are new.

Under their leadership, the Tory party made a decisive break with global warming denial – one of the greatest systems of organised stupidity in the modern world.  In 2006 Cameron posed with huskies in the Arctic Circle to emphasise his concern about the melting ice caps. At the end of a press conference, Conservative PRs handed baffled journalists birch saplings in hemp bags. The hacks were meant to do their bit for the fight against global warming by planting in their gardens.

All gimmicks to be sure, but they made the point that the Conservative Party accepted science rather than raged against it. On the economic and strategic imperative of Britain remaining in the EU, the Tory modernisers were coyer. Cameron and Osborne appeased their party’s right for years and only spoke up for the EU when it was too late to make a difference. Still they, if not Gove, were convinced that the only way for the Tories to survive in the 21st century was to ‘stop banging on about Europe’.

Less noticed than the culture war between liberalism and conservatism are the culture wars within liberalism and conservatism.

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