I was amused the other week to read George Osborne’s Diary in this magazine. In it the man now in charge of giving away the British Museum’s collection recalled something John Major said to him in 1997. This was that the Conservative party ‘will never win while we remain in thrall to the hard right of our party’. It is news that the Conservative party ever was.
Really this was a warning from Osborne that the centre-left tendencies of the Conservative party must be adhered to. Though it should be noted that there is a flaw at the source: citing John Major on electoral advice is like quoting a bankrupt on financial planning. Major’s period in office was so calamitous that one of his main policies – pushing through the Maastricht Bill – not only divided his party but caused a wound that was only partly cauterised by a national plebiscite more than two decades later.
If the right is to cohere, it will have to have some soggy centrists and some people who are actually right-wing
Expect these warnings from the losing branch of the Conservative party for the foreseeable. They will come from people who think that Boris Johnson and Rishi Sunak’s terms in office were not as popular as they could have been because they weren’t green enough and did not push hard enough to make the country’s energy bills unaffordable. The headlines are already being written: ‘The battle for the soul of the Conservative party.’ That sort of thing. Except this time there is a person who handily fulfils the role of Mephistopheles in the drama.
Nigel Farage’s Reform party was, like the Brexit party and Ukip before that, a completely unforced error on the British right. There was no reason why the Conservative party had to swing so pro-EU after Margaret Thatcher’s time in office, and no reason why the people who turned out to be on the side of the general public’s feeling had to be dismissed as headbangers and closet racists.
But remnants of the Conservative party will stick at it. Just this week Giles Watling made an intervention into British politics. ‘Who is Giles Watling?’ I hear you ask with a slightly feigned interest. Since 2017 he has been the Conservative member for the constituency of Clacton. This week he responded to a successful and energetic rally that Farage held in Birmingham.
That was quite an event, with thousands of cheering Reform voters. Farage himself came onstage accompanied by those fireworks that Taylor Swift and other pop stars regularly employ in their acts. If Rishi Sunak came onstage with fireworks, you would think it the worst misstep since his damp election call. If Keir Starmer entered to such a fanfare, people would regard it as the cringiest thing since Ed Davey. That is because nobody in the country is enthusiastic about Sunak or Starmer. Nobody would light an indoor sparkler to celebrate their entrance into a room. Farage is different.
Of course, criticisms of his Birmingham rally from other politicians were not just motivated by envy. They also had to include that crucial element of fraudulent disgust. Since one of the speeches in Birmingham was given by a talented young British Muslim entrepreneur, Farage’s opponents couldn’t claim that the whole thing was a white supremacist affair. Instead they focused on the fact that the walls of the arena were covered not only with screens but with our national flag.
This is what the great Watling decided to seize on. In his view the rally organised by his political rival was ‘reminiscent’ of Nazi events in Nuremberg. Perhaps aware of the laws of libel, the man who has represented Clacton so anonymously for seven years went on to say: ‘I’m not ascribing any of these sorts of things to Nigel Farage himself. But the method, the process, is just sort of reminiscent of the big rallies at Nuremberg, with people standing to one side. There may be no evil intent, but it feels wrong and bad.’
This statement is notable for being so weaselly. I do love all that ‘It’s just like the Nazis but perhaps it’s not meant to be and in any case I’m not saying it in order to smear anyone’ oratorical style. But what makes the criticism really noteworthy is that it is so inept.
It is the nature of large gatherings that people stand around. And if the problem is the prevalence of the Union Jack, then we must simply deem it unfortunate that Watling’s personal Twitter page consists of his face superimposed over the Union Jack. It would be easy enough for a person to say that this too has chilling Nuremberg echoes. But that would be to pretend that because the Nazis had a sinister flag, all flags are sinister. Or that because Adolf Hitler often spoke to rooms of standing people, all rooms of standing people are like Hitler’s audiences.
By the time you have read this, Watling is likely to be seeking new employment. But the more important question is what all of this means now. Reform have undoubtedly helped the Conservative party to a greater defeat than they might otherwise have gone down to. But after 14 years, many people on the right have had enough of the Conservatives insisting they and they alone can be trusted. Cameron, May, Johnson, Truss and Sunak one after the other destroyed the Conservative party’s ability to be seen as fiscally capable or anything but the party of open borders. The ‘You have to vote for us’ line no longer holds. That is the consequence of the Conservative party’s failure. No one else’s.
If the British right is to cohere, it will have to have some soggy centrists, and they will have to be tolerated. But it will also have to have some people who are actually right-wing – in economics, social policy, immigration policy and much more. Nobody needs fear these people. As the electorates in almost every democracy other than ours are showing, what John Major might think extreme policies are in fact wholesomely mainstream. What a shame his party had to be reminded quite so forcefully of that truth.
Comments