The Conservatives believe that they uniquely represent British values – so what need is there to admit the UK is changing? says Guardian columnist Andy Beckett
Why exactly are the Conservatives so upbeat, barely three months after their worst-ever election defeat? At their party conference, in their leadership contest and in the Tory press, the mood has been unexpectedly positive, even unrepentant, with relatively few recriminations and little deep reflection. During the conference, I lost count of how often people told me the party would be back in power within a few years.
There are some straightforward explanations: Labour’s troubles trying to run the country; Tory relief that they have been given a break from that difficult task; the displacement activity of the leadership contest; and the fact that the grind of opposition has not properly begun yet – all these are making being out of office easier than many Tories feared during the long run-up to the election.
Yet a deeper force is also keeping the party relatively buoyant, one of the oldest and most taken-for-granted factors in our politics: Conservative confidence.
It has three main sources. The first is the longevity and recurrent electoral success of the party itself, which has existed for either two or three centuries, depending on how you define this shape-shifting entity. In an almost self-sustaining cycle, both the Tories and many of the party’s enemies, analysts and historians believe that it is the most enduringly successful political organisation in the democratic world.
The second source of Tory confidence is their intimate relationship with class privilege, social connections and wealth. This year, their party conference was preceded by gleeful predictions from left-of-centre journalists that there would be a thin attendance. Yet in fact the convention halls, marquees and corridors were busy, as they always are, not just with delegates from ordinary backgrounds but with expensively dressed people with second-home tans, greeting old friends in private-school accents. The Tories may have been defeated, but their networks definitely have not.
The final source of Tory self-assurance is ideological. Almost 40 years on from Thatcherism’s heyday, and despite all the damage done to the credibility of the Conservative version of free-market capitalism by the financial crisis, as well as the terrible performance of the privatised utilities and the stagnation or worse in most Britons’ living standards, the party still believes its economic ideas are fundamentally sound. Robert Jenrick spoke at the conference about extending Thatcher’s “great reforms”, while his leadership rival Kemi Badenoch said Britain was “overburdening business” with “too much government”, as if the decades of deregulation begun by Thatcher had never happened.
The party is also certain that the spread of social liberalism through much of the population in recent decades, during both Labour and Tory governments, has been hugely damaging. Rather than seeing it as a result of individuals gradually changing their minds, through personal experience or new sources of information, such as the internet, the party insists that the process is the result of indoctrination, by supposedly leftwing institutions such as the BBC and universities.
As with the economy, what is striking is not just the old-fashioned nature of this Tory mindset but its exclusion of any information that might undermine it. Thus Badenoch accepts in her recent, much-hyped pamphlet Conservatism in Crisis that there was an “economic slowdown” under her party. But rather than acknowledge that Brexit has caused trade frictions, for example, she blames the slowdown on the “rise of the bureaucratic class”, her term for regulators and diversity-promoting human resources departments. Conveniently, Britain’s lack of growth is the fault of some of her favourite scapegoats, and the certainties of modern Conservatism are left undisturbed.
Sometimes, intense conviction is politically useful. Labour governments often lack it, and the result can be insecure ministers, going too far to ingratiate themselves with essentially hostile interests, such as the rightwing press or anti-worker businesses, some of which Keir Starmer invited to an investment summit in London last week. It’s hard to imagine a Tory premier similarly risking the rage of their core supporters by trying to butter up union leaders.
Yet at least Labour tries to adapt to changing realities. One big shift in Britain that the Conservatives seem too complacent to face is the longterm decline in their electoral potency. Since the late 1980s, they have only won one substantial majority, in 2019, while Labour has won four. Younger voters, urban voters, Scottish voters and Welsh voters: all have become ever more alienated by the Tories, in part by their apparently unshakeable confidence – commonly seen as arrogance – with the result that only unusually favourable political circumstances, such as the Brexit election of 2019, produce the sort of crushing victory that the party used to achieve routinely.
Only among older people does the Conservative conviction that they uniquely represent the nation still seem reasonably justified. Despite the Tory implosion at the last election, the party got more votes from the over-65s than Labour and Reform combined.
Yet self-belief based on the support of this narrow demographic has a brittle quality. The politics of pensioners may soon diversify, as more people enter the cohort with outlooks shaped by social liberalism. Meanwhile, the fear of a changing world, which lies behind many older Tory voters’ politics, sits in tension with the Conservatives’ fundamental confidence, while also making the party too fixated on the past. Jenrick and Badenoch are only in their 40s, but fogeyishly preoccupied by protecting old statues and justifying the British empire. Their party does not seem to like the modern world much. In that sense, the Tories are both too confident and not confident enough.
The ongoing volatility of our politics and the erratic outcomes of our electoral system mean the Tories could conceivably return to power as quickly as they hope. One recent poll put them neck-and-neck with Labour. If the Conservatives do recover electorally, a lot will be written about their resilience – and about how their uncanny confidence is always justified.
Yet as long as that self-assurance leaves them incurious about much of the country, casual about the business of governing and over-reliant on old voters and old ideas, then their next government is likely to be short-lived or ineffective, or both.
Before the Conservatives can truly revive, a Tory crisis of confidence is required.
Andy Beckett is a Guardian columnist