The Tories have changed direction – but they may not be headed where you think

With only a year or less to go before a general election, one would have thought the Conservative Party’s historic will to power would by now have begun to reassert itself, ensuring that its members set aside their differences in order to take the fight to Labour.

No such luck. Rather than subsiding, what’s now routinely described as “the Tory civil war” seems to have entered a new, even more vicious phase. The Prime Minister’s decision to sack Suella Braverman and bring back David Cameron has been widely interpreted as Rishi Sunak finally deciding to align himself and his party with the supposedly “moderate” centre-Right. Frozen out, in this take, is the populist radical Right personified by the now former home secretary and another ex-PM, Red Wall-winning Boris Johnson. The inevitable conclusion is that the two camps are now set for a tooth-and-nail fight to the death.

But is the reality as simple as that?

The ‘zealots’

No sooner had news of the reshuffle emerged than supporters of “Suella” – who like Johnson now goes by her first name in politics – were rushing to declare their dismay. Writing for The Telegraph, Miriam Cates and Danny Kruger, founders of the New Conservatives – a collection of 20 or so MPs who mostly represent seats in the North and the Midlands – claimed that, “instead of returning us to the promises of 2019, this reshuffle looks more like an attempt to reconvene the class of 2015”.

Theirs is only the latest of a long line of Tory backbench ginger groups inspired by the success of the European Research Group, which stiffened the Government’s stance on Brexit. The aims of this latest ‘party within a party’, are threefold: It aims to “support legislation that delivers on the priorities of the people”; “to develop ideas for the 2024 Conservative Party Manifesto”; and to “campaign and raise funds for New Conservative candidates in marginal seats”. The fact that the New Conservatives have John Hayes as their honorary president is also significant. In both policy and personnel there is considerable overlap with Hayes’ very own Common Sense Group, which has been around since the summer of 2020 and operates in essentially the same ideological space.

Its 2021, occasionally hyperbolic collection of essays, Common Sense: Conservative Thinking for a Post-Liberal Age, sets out clearly what that space is: “‘Common sense’ is deemed to be the preserve of ‘the people’ and/or ‘ordinary people’ – the ‘mainstream majority’ at permanent risk of betrayal by an overly-progressive, insufficiently patriotic ‘elite’, which sneers and sniggers at their salt-of-the-earth attitudes to everything from what’s on the telly to the British empire, sex education in schools, ‘cancel culture’ in universities, and – above all – curbing immigration.”

Indeed, the latter – along with a (presumably related) concern about British women being discouraged from having all the children that they would ideally like and that the country badly needs – is something of an obsession for the Cates and Kruger group. A raft of recommendations on how to reduce the numbers coming to the UK from abroad was the subject of the New Conservatives’ first-ever report, produced in July. So it is hardly surprising that its members have been all over the media this week, urging Sunak to show the Supreme Court who’s boss.

One of them (the man he appointed Deputy Party Chairman, Lee Anderson) argued that the court’s judgment on the Rwanda plan was “a dark day for British people”: asylum-seekers, he claimed, were “intruders” and “we should ignore the law and send them back the same day.”

Its movers and shakers were just as put out by Monday’s reshuffle as they were by the Rwanda decision on Wednesday. To them the Cabinet changes signalled, as Kruger and Cates put it in an open letter published on Tuesday, “a major change in the policy direction of the Government” to the extent that “the Conservative Party now looks like it is deliberately walking away from the coalition of voters who brought us into power with a large majority in 2019” – an election which, in their words, “represented the realignment of our politics”.

Whether this “realignment” was a permanent watershed, or a more contingent, never-to-be-repeated confluence of Brexit, Boris and Corbyn, is now at the heart of the Tory in-fighting. Tory opponents of the New Conservatives point to mounting polling evidence suggesting the latter, and hint darkly that talk of realignment is actually just self-interest on the part of new Red Wall Conservative MPs, who were swept into Parliament by the unique circumstances of 2019, and who now fear being swept out of it again in 2024. Understanding which side of the “realignment” Conservative MPs are on is crucial to understanding the divide within the Party now being painted as between ‘soft’ and ‘hard’ Right; between ‘moderate’ and ‘zealot’.

The ‘moderates’

Conservatives who see themselves as not only more moderate but more realistic – the centre-Right, if you like – may have appreciated the way that Johnson pulled the party out of the nosedive it was in during the last days of Theresa May. They may also have admired the way that Johnson crushed Corbyn and, every bit as importantly, brushed aside Nigel Farage by building upon the culturally conservative coalition that May (for all the good it did her) managed to forge between affluent voters in the party’s southern heartlands and somewhat less affluent (but hardly destitute) voters in the more or less post-industrial North and Midlands.

However, they (and here at least, “they” includes Boris Johnson himself) never ran away with the idea, unlike their “faith, flag and family” colleagues, that this was somehow forever.

Obviously, the centre-Right hoped, along with Johnson, that the party might be able to hold 2019’s winning coalition together for another election or two. Hence a combination of targeted regional and infrastructure spending (“levelling up”); some much-trumpeted bungs to the NHS (40 “new” hospitals and tens of thousands of “new” nurses); and a promise to reverse May’s police cuts. Hence, too, a limited, largely rhetorical, “war on woke”, along with a tough line on “illegal” asylum-seekers to distract from the embarrassingly liberal post-Brexit immigration regime necessitated by the UK labour market’s chronic skills shortages.

But, ultimately, as far as the centre-Right was concerned anyway, this was still an essentially Conservative government. None of the above (nor, indeed, the irritating but sadly necessary transition to net zero) should be allowed to cost the Government and its taxpayers too much money, nor do anything to reduce UK capital’s access to world markets and vice versa.

For centre-Right Tories, after all, Brexit (which most had cautioned and voted against in 2016) was risk enough. Fingers crossed it might work out well enough in the end, even if, in their view, there was little hope of pushing through the deregulation and welfare-state slashing that some of their more neo-liberal colleagues were advocating.

As for colleagues arguing the opposite, namely that the referendum result represented a mandate and an opportunity to return to a quasi-mercantilist, even protectionist regime, they were barking – and not just up the wrong tree.

But does the reshuffle mean that the centre-Right has at last put those colleagues back in their respective boxes and that Sunak has finally outed himself as one of them all along? And does it represent not only the return of Cameron but of the Cameroons?

Back to the future?

Apparently – and unsurprisingly given how much he relied on him when he was prime minister – Cameron (who was apparently recommended for the job by his own former foreign secretary, William Hague) is still pretty thick with his former chancellor, George Osborne. Meanwhile, the latter’s one-time chief of staff (and now prospective parliamentary candidate) Rupert Harrison is on the Economic Advisory Council appointed by Jeremy Hunt, two-time secretary of state under Cameron. Moreover Danny Finkelstein, Conservative peer and author of the appositely-titled Everything in Moderation and a must-read piece in David Gauke’s recently published essay collection The Case for the Centre Right, is said to be helping Sunak prep for PMQs, as well as, along with Hague, offering him sage advice in his weekly newspaper column.

Meanwhile, front of house, there’s the trio of former Cameron-era Number 10 and CCHQ staffers – Deputy PM and Cabinet Office Minister Oliver Dowden; Laura Trott, just promoted to Chief Secretary of the Treasury; and Richard Holden, Sunak’s new Party Chairman. And then there are those, like the media-friendly scions of Conservative families, Victoria Atkins (now doing Hunt’s old job at Health and Social Care) and Laura Farris (given her first junior ministerial role in the reshuffle), who, like Energy Secretary Claire Coutinho, would surely have fitted in perfectly had they been in SW1 a decade ago.

But does one Cameron, and a handful of Cameroons, a centre-Right Tory government, let alone a centre-Right Tory Party, make? Have they really taken back control? Are they suddenly the future once again? And if there is such a thing as “the soul” of the Conservative Party, will they emerge victorious in a battle for it with the New Conservatives, or indeed with the “Trussites” of the Conservative Growth Group who are also itching to get into the fight?

The answer to all these questions is a resounding no.

The return of cakeism

The most obvious reason why not is that Sunak is clearly as determined as his predecessors (and especially, of course, Johnson) to have his cake and eat it. Yes, he’s hoping to project the supposedly moderate (but in reality broadly Thatcherite) managerial competence trumpeted (not always with good reason) by the centre-Right. But at the same time he’s keen to remind “the people” that he’s on their side when it comes to resisting the attempts of “foreign courts” to prevent him stopping the boats, to beating back “woke” and (to coin a phrase), to getting rid of at least some of the more immediately costly “green crap” (copyright D Cameron) associated with the transition to net zero.

That, after all, was what motivated some of the culture-war clichés Sunak spouted during his (failed) first leadership bid. It was what motivated his surprise appointment of another Cameron-era (albeit non-Cameroon) blast-from-the-past politician, Esther McVey (founder of the self-appointed Blue Collar Conservatives and sometime GBNews co-host), as his so-called “Minister for Common Sense”. It was what motivated his press conference promise on Wednesday to do whatever it takes to get planes taking off to Rwanda. And it was what motivated him not to sack Anderson for suggesting that those planes should leave that same day, arguing instead that “Lee’s comments reflect the strength of feeling on this issue”.

The other reason why the Cameroons – “the establishment”, “the patricians”, the “Blue-Wallers”, whatever you want to call them – won’t permanently win the day is also the reason why the Red Wall’s “send-them-backers” and Truss’s “Singapore on Thames” tendency won’t win it either.

The UK’s first past the post electoral system practically guarantees that our two main parties are essentially coalitions. In the Conservatives’ case, that coalition runs from the Reform-adjacent populist radical Right to those who like to think of themselves as “one-nation Tories”. There is, then, no such thing as what Braverman in her poison-pen letter to Sunak referred to as “an authentic Conservative agenda” – only a series of sometimes cross-cutting, sometimes complementary Conservative tendencies. And their relative strength rises and falls depending in part on which wannabe and existing MPs happen to win or lose their seats whenever a general election rolls around. A bunch of defeats in the Red Wall in 2024, for instance, will severely (if only temporarily) weaken the populist radical Right – one reason why Braverman is unlikely to win any post-election leadership contest.

Moreover, the likelihood of any of these tendencies becoming hegemonic in the party is made all the smaller by the fact that British public opinion is wide-ranging but also thermostatic. Like the central heating kicking in when it gets too cold, Tory governments that don’t spend enough to prevent public services visibly crumbling sooner or later get replaced by a Labour government that does. And just as the heating ticks off at a certain threshold, that Labour government, having done its best to restore those services, eventually gets booted out in favour of a Tory government responding to voters grumbling about high taxes.

Arguments about cultural issues (mainly immigration), as well as questions of leadership and competence, can disrupt and delay that turn-taking – just as they did in 2019. And that can provoke in-fighting both between and within the parties, with ginger groups within each claiming to possess the secret of electoral success. They may be right – in which case they gain the upper hand for a while. But they’re never right every time – and so they lose it again.

True blue? Who?

Because the Conservative Party’s primary goal has traditionally been to keep the other lot out of power rather than to implement a self-consciously ideological programme, it has, on balance, adapted more rapidly and more successfully than its Labour opponent. It has always been helped, too, by its historic willingness to espouse an unflinching patriotism, and by the desire shared widely on its benches to keep government spending and intervention to a minimum. This means that, contrary to appearances, there is often actually far more that unites than divides its adherents, wherever they happen to sit (or claim to sit) on the Conservatives’ ideological continuum.

Johnson sometimes challenged that unity. While he is vaunted on the Right for Brexit and trouncing Corbyn, he was far happier than Cameron to allow both spending and immigration figures to soar. For all his electoral achievements, Johnson’s opportunism on these two critical issues tugged at the social and economic threads binding the party’s disparate wings. This week’s irony is that, just as he is being derided as the embodiment of a regressive move to the soft centre, Cameron’s traditional views on spending and immigration may help glue the shards of a fractured parliamentary party together.

None of this means, of course, that Sunak will be able to turn things around electorally by next year. Nor does it mean that, should he fail to do so, the party will necessarily make a quick return to office. After all, it took 13 years (and a global financial crash) after 1997, and even then Cameron failed to win a majority.

Moreover, flirting with populist Right-wing politics is one thing. Swallowing it whole – even if only for a while – is quite another, especially in a country that statistics show, to the frustration and fury of some, is becoming more multicultural and more socially liberal with each passing year. That is a warning to ambitious leadership hopefuls on the Tory Right like Braverman and Kemi Badenoch: it is dangerous to pull faces when the wind is changing; you don’t want to get stuck in the wrong pose.

Tim Bale is Professor of Politics at Queen Mary University of London and author of The Conservative Party after Brexit: Turmoil and Transformation

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