When the Conservative party descends on Birmingham next week for its annual conference, you’d be forgiven for expecting a morose postmortem. With hundreds fewer MPs in attendance than last year and the final rounds of an altogether muted leadership contest less than six weeks away, this will be the first conference in 14 years at which Britain’s so-called natural party of government will arrive as a party exiled to opposition.
And yet listening to the wannabe leaders over recent weeks, this does not exactly sound like a group bracing for a deep reflection on the worst governance in modern times. As the current favourite, Robert Jenrick, put it in his campaign video: “I got elected 10 years ago and for most of that time I thought our politics broadly worked.”
Three months on from their historic election defeat, there is little sign that the Conservatives have any real understanding of what got them there. Nor any hint of remorse for the state they left the country in. Forget NHS waiting lists, mortgage payment hikes or benefit cuts. Ignore food banks, closed libraries and record homelessness. Don’t mention Brexit, Partygate or PPE contracts for chums. It never happened, or at least none of it really matters. Let’s call it the gaslighting of a nation, where former ministers pitch their vision to save Britain as people die waiting for a doctor’s appointment.
The dilemma for a party recovering from a large electoral defeat, not least one that has been in office for such a stretch, is that it must look to the future while showing it is learning from the past. This balance is rarely easy to strike. Consider Labour’s 2010-2015 wilderness years, in which the leadership embraced austerity and anti-immigration mugs as (undeserved) penance for the global financial crash. But the sheer scale of the catastrophe caused by the Tory party over five successive prime ministers means a strategy of deny and deflect will not work either.
This is even more the case due to the awkward fact every leadership candidate used to sit in cabinet. Just this month, Jenrick called the early prison release scheme to ease overcrowding “a day of shame”, presumably suffering amnesia about which party was in power until July. Watching the Conservative leadership contest feels like seeing a dodgy electrical company respond to a scandal with a new name and logo. A quick rebrand won’t cut it when customers are still nursing their burns.
Unable to distance themselves from the crises they helped create, candidates are paying lip service to the word “change” while offering the same old dog whistles and fringe ideas. Tom Tugendhat, who is widely seen as the “centrist” of the group, is willing to leave the European convention on human rights. Meanwhile, Jenrick warned GB News viewers that “people will die” if immigration isn’t curbed. The former Home Office minister has pledged to cut net migration to as little as thousands a year, with no word as yet on who will be caring for your grandparents.
Those who do acknowledge the “existential” threat to the party are using it to justify lurching ever further to the right. That winning the leadership requires appealing to fellow Tory MPs and party members – otherwise known as the people who gave the nation Liz Truss – only encourages this. Look to Thatcherite James Cleverly, whose plan to fix crumbling public services is seemingly to cut his way to a smaller state. Elsewhere, Kemi Badenoch is engaging in open Islamophobia – labelling the five independent MPs elected on pro-Gaza platforms as practising “sectarian, Islamist politics”, whose ideas “have no place here”.
It is not simply that this stuff is blatantly bigoted or dangerous in an already broken public realm, but that it is lightweight – a superficial response to all too serious times. Few moments exemplify this more than Badenoch’s choice to launch her leadership campaign by tackling not NHS queues or child poverty, but the bloke who used to be in Doctor Who.
There are lessons that the Conservatives can learn from their defeat, if the party wishes to: about what happens when government is defined by culture wars rather than public service; of the stain that incompetence alongside immorality can leave; and the limits to the electorate’s patience.
And yet there is one crucial detail that will scupper any chance for genuine growth: the Tories do not think they have done anything wrong. The main tenets of their time in office – austerity, Brexit, anti-migrant policy – have not been disowned by the leadership candidates. Indeed, most are ramping it up. Any errors that are acknowledged are framed as a failure of execution rather than substance. If a policy didn’t work, it was a bad actor – lefty lawyers, a divided cabinet – that scuppered it. Even the toxic tone and rhetoric used by ministers was, apparently, the right call. As Badenoch remarked last week, she “never has gaffes” or has to “apologise for something”. Like an addict trying to make amends, it is hard to be rehabilitated if you can’t admit you’ve got a problem.
Months after the drama of election night, attention has naturally shifted to the new government. Current Labour scandal and missteps are more newsworthy than old Tory ones. When pundits do cover the Conservatives in the coming days, it will be a blow-by-blow of the party’s psychodrama: who’s making manoeuvres at conference for the top jobs; which wing of the party will prosper. Remember, then, the millions of lives still blighted by their actions. The teacher with breast cancer waiting months for a mastectomy on the NHS. The wheelchair user who can’t visit friends since their benefits-linked car was removed.
You could call this collateral damage but really, they are consequences. The tragedy, of course, is that it is not the Tory party that is facing them. While ordinary people pay the price for years of Conservative misrule, those responsible vie for promotion and power. Some things really do never change.
Frances Ryan is a Guardian columnist
