The Tories are a party in search of policies

‘What would a Conservative manifesto say on Brexit?’ Many Tories consider this question a slam-dunk argument against an early election. But the party’s predicament is actually much worse. It is easier to work out what their manifesto would say on Brexit than on a whole host of other issues.

The Tories are relatively united on Brexit, for the moment. Only eight of the party’s MPs voted against Sir Graham Brady’s amendment last month which authorised Theresa May to seek ‘alternatives’ to the backstop. So this would be the Tory position in a pre-Brexit election. In an immediate post-Brexit contest May would presumably seek a vague mandate to negotiate the best possible future relationship, leaving open what precisely that is.

But what about everything else? Here it is much harder to see what the Tories would say. Their 2017 manifesto marked a bold (and, as it turned out, calamitous) attempt to redefine the party. It was meant to drag the Tories to the left, making them far more of a Christian Democrat party. There was an attack on what it called ‘untrammelled free markets’, and it declared that ‘our responsibility to one another is greater than the rights we hold as individuals’.

It is hard to copy Labour language and policy while simultaneously discouraging people from voting Labour. Which is what voters did in 2017, in numbers large enough to strip the Tories of their majority. The manifesto — and particularly its rushed-through policy on social care — took most of the blame for this. Policies it proposed, such as lifting the ban on new grammar schools, are now all tainted by association.