Spooky season came early to Manchester this year. Outside the convention centre, a baffled, shattered city reels from the latest round of political violence, but inside, eyeless mannequins of Margaret Thatcher stare out over an empty exhibition hall where what remains of the Conservative party tries to understand what went wrong.
There’s something macabre about this Tory conference. It could be one of those pre-crash horror films where the protagonist doesn’t realise they’ve been dead all along. I’m reminded of Nicole Kidman, rattling mad-eyed around that dark mansion in The Others, fretting through her old routines, refusing to accept the reality of her self-made hell where she slaughtered her children, and then herself, and then the world moved on. The shadow cabinet should watch it. They might learn something.
The modern Conservative party has functioned as a machine for clinging to power at any cost it can persuade someone else to pay; it exists to win, believes it deserves to by definition, and cannot understand itself in defeat. That sort of doltish entitlement metastasises the harder you believe your own hype.
And that’s what’s happened here. The Conservative party assumed that, as the ‘natural party of government’, it would always exist. For the first time in three centuries, they’ve Tracy-Emined the bed so badly that they’re not even the opposition any more.
Power has moved on. The few remaining careerists who haven’t slunk off to a lucrative post on the lecture circuit are jumping ship to Reform. The closest they have to a young gun is Robert Jenrick, currently most famous for making asylum centres paint over their cartoon murals, because God forbid a child who came to this country seeking safety should experience a moment’s joy. Ambitious young right-wingers are not joining the Tories. They’re grifting on YouTube or flirting with the far right, who might let them run their very own local council into the ground.
Before the mortifying conference footage started sliding across my screen, I hadn’t thought about the Conservative party for weeks – which is extraordinary, given how they’ve squatted over my entire adult life. As they are still technically a party, they have to have a conference, where the latest woman to be handed the broom and expected to clear up Boris Johnson’s mess did her bit of cargo-cult Thatcherism, ritually insisting that ‘the facts of life are conservative’ to an audience of 12.
On an ordinary day, Kemi Badenoch talks like she’s auditioning to be a robot in the school play. Her leader’s speech was Frankensteined together out of the sort of desperate affirmations your best friend sends you when you’ve just been dumped and even your dachshund has left you for someone newer, meaner and madder. I almost expected her to start chanting ‘I am enough’ into the autocue. Incredibly, she opened by insisting that her party ‘has always loved Manchester’ – a city that has not elected a Tory since 1984 or trusted one since Peterloo. Badenoch fawned over the Churchillian legacy of the European Convention on Human Rights she promised to destroy, then insisted that ‘terrorists will never destroy our democracy’ – presumably because her own party has beaten them to it.
After that, a succession of navy-suited non-entities got up and stammered platitudes, like drunk teenagers trying to explain to their parents how they managed to trash the house. Mel Stride daringly described how he benefited from the education, housing and social mobility his party has taken away from generations to come. Mercifully, someone bundled him offstage before he got a chance to yell ‘We’re all in this together’, but not before he announced that his was, and always would be, the ‘party of fiscal responsibility’.
People vote Tory when they have a stake in the status quo – property, security, assets to pass to their children
The fact that he seemed to believe it is embarrassing. The fact that he expects anyone else to is insulting. That barefaced, blundering contempt for the electorate is precisely why Partygate was the nation’s breaking point. Fifteen years ago, when the carnage began, much was made of Cameron, Osborne and Johnson’s history in the Bullingdon Club. The cabinet recruited heavily from the infamous Oxford drinking society for posh boys who liked to get hammered, smash up restaurants and then performatively pay for the damage. They behaved the same way in office – gleefully vandalising the economy, wrecking our international reputation and plunging our previously stable democracy into a decade of cack-handed constitutional crisis, messy-drunk on their own audacity. But when presented with the bill, they vanished.
Somewhere in a hall in Manchester, a ghostly voice is whispering ‘Broken Britain’, which turned out to be the one campaign promise the party managed to follow through on even before the omnishambles of Brexit. By sheer incompetence, the Tory party has created the conditions for its own extinction.
For fourteen years, a haunted merry-go-round of maliciously incompetent leaders failed to understand what Thatcher knew: that the facts of life are only conservative in specific circumstances. People vote Tory when they have a stake in the status quo – property, security, assets to pass to their children. Somewhere between austerity, Brexit and the Truss mini-Budget, it became clear that you cannot run an economy on vibes. This is now a country with collapsing infrastructure, crumbling school buildings, an actually broken healthcare system and a population that has been too poor, too angry and too hopeless for too long. This week, even the protesters couldn’t be bothered to show up.
Empire might begin at home, but it ends there too. The remains of the British Conservative party have stuck to the proud imperial tradition of ransacking a country, wrecking its political settlement and then expecting gratitude. The definitive Tory skill is self-preservation, and those with any talent for it have long since bolted for the Home Counties. The only thing the Tories could have left to offer this country is an apology.
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