As the Conservative party conference gets under way this weekend, there is a pause in the seemingly relentless civil wars of recent years, as the Tory tribes gather in Manchester.
But tensions continue to bubble beneath the surface; the presence of Liz Truss and enduring popularity of Boris Johnson among sections of the membership serve as reminders of dividing lines.
Membership of what are often unofficial groupings overlap, and divisions are often more Venn diagram than hard borders. Key tribes are broken down below, but others might well include China hawks such as Iain Duncan Smith, the “Blue Collar” caucus of MPs from working-class backgrounds, such as Esther McVey, along with green-minded Tories worried about a trashing of the party’s environmental credentials.
Free market ultras/Liz Truss nostalgics
A large swathe of the party still regard the late 20th-century policies of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher as a bible in theory. While that might have included Rishi Sunak, his bruising leadership battle with Truss exposed a fault-line in the party involving those who deem others not sufficiently Thatcherite, with Sunak consistently coming under fire for a supposedly high-spending, high-tax approach as chancellor.
Keepers of the Thatcherite flame, meanwhile, range from an actual veteran of her government, John Redwood, to MPs including Jacob Rees-Mogg, who has gone as far as accusing Sunak of raising tax to “socialist” levels
Others include ministers from the 49-day premiership of Truss, such as Simon Clarke and Ranil Jayawardena, who led the recently formed Conservative Growth Group.
Truss – who is seeking to exert influence as a champion of lower tax, reining in spending and supply side reform – will share a stage at the Tory conference with Priti Patel at a “growth rally”.
Northern Tories
Expect MPs who have come together in the Northern Research Group (NRG), established in the wake of the 2019 capture of ”red wall” constituencies from Labour, to lay out a range of pre-election “asks” from the government in a northern manifesto set to be unveiled in Manchester.
Prominent figures include its chair, John Stevenson, the former party chairman Jake Berry, former Brexit secretary David Davis and the current Tory deputy chairman, Lee Anderson. The yearning for the party to look beyond England’s south-east finds an echo among Scottish Tories and others including the north-east mayor Ben Houchen.
Its main focus is on lobbying the government to shore up support in the north of England by making good on successive Conservative leaders’ pledges to “level up” through investment and targeted schemes.
Although members have mixed views on HS2, they have been lobbying hard to protect elements of the legislation, paving the way for greater connectivity between cities and across the Pennines, which they have christened “the Charles Line”.
The culture warriors
To an extent, this is a group that has been absorbed into the mainstream of Conservative politics, with even Sunak, once mistakenly viewed as a largely ideology-free technocrat, expected to lean increasingly into culture war issues as the election approaches.
But as May’s NatCon conference showed, some in the party clearly see this as not just an electoral strategy but a fundamental tenet of philosophy and policy.
Among the most vocal are Danny Kruger and Miriam Cates, who back Viktor Orbán-style pushbacks against “woke” ideologies coupled with concerns over falling birth rates.
Along with Kemi Badenoch, the biggest Tory beast at the National Conservatism is Suella Braverman. The home secretary is not quite so far down the Orbán/Georgia Meloni path of nativism as Kruger and Cates, but is likely to be the standard-bearer for this group if the Conservatives lose the general election.
Braverman is happy to bash the woke if needed, and has faced criticism for divisive comments over subjects such as the ethnicity of sex abuse gangs, but specialises more in another strand of populism, based on authoritarianism over borders.
The one nation Tories
A group that has been on the retreat since Brexit, and certainly since Theresa May was ousted by Johnson. A formerly influential and listened-to caucus, its advocates were central to challenging Johnson over the constitution-busting aspects of his Brexit plan – to their cost.
A total of 21 Tories were stripped of the party whip after rebelling over a possible no-deal Brexit, among them a string of centrist types. The majority ended up leaving the Commons in 2019, among them David Gauke, Justine Greening, Rory Stewart, Phillip Lee and Sam Gyimah – the latter two via the Liberal Democrats.
Some centrists remain, notably May’s de facto deputy, Damian Green, and the former cabinet minister Greg Clark, while others, including Tom Tugendhat, are even in government.
There is unlikely to be a vast amount of scheming among such MPs in Manchester, in part because of last year’s chaos under Liz Truss, and there is a desire for a period of calm.
The One Nation group, which is largely informal anyway, appears to be biding their time for what could be a bare-knuckle fight against the culture warriors and Truss’s rump group of ultra-free market devotees for the future direction of the party.
