After 13 years of power and five prime ministers, the Conservatives increasingly appear to be held together by string. The consensus is that the party faces either significant decline or catastrophe at the next general election. Amid the talk of sleaze, incompetence and chaos, what is often missed about post-Covid politics is the role of morality. For the first time in generations, the admittedly pliable concept of right and wrong is on the agenda. If the personal is political, then Britain is taking politics very personally indeed.
Enemies of the Tories have always believed they are immoral — the Aneurin Bevan “lower than vermin” position — but a particular challenge the Government faces now is that even natural allies perceive their decisions as morally wrong, as opposed to objectively wrong.
It’s not that half the country has stopped feeling conservative either — it’s that they have stopped wanting to be Conservatives. That even applies to their own MPs, who, like elk within the sound of howling wolves, are emitting a kind of panic musk. They live in dread of facing the public on the doorstep as avatars of Boris Johnson, Liz Truss and Rishi Sunak. What they fear, in a biblical sense, is judgement.
Even though the economy will dominate the minds of Britain’s voters next year, it’s what’s in their hearts that will be decisive. The existential threat for Conservatives comes from an unscientific feeling of betrayal. The sense that this Government is dishonourable as well as useless is unsettling. The epitome of this is Partygate, a year-old wound that will not heal. Johnson made sure of that and became defined by questions of morality that he had until that point managed to evade. Millions concluded, unequivocally, that he misled them. Partygate was something profoundly personal to the electorate and still carries enormous symbolic heft. It’s one thing to be aware of your prime minister’s attitude to probity, it’s quite another to have it shoved in your face after two years of fear, frustration and sacrifice in lockdown.
Johnson’s presence at those parties gave the sense of an act of emotional vandalism against the nation
That’s not to say it isn’t slightly absurd to fixate on a few late-night drinking sessions and a secret birthday party as the cause of moral disgust. But it demonstrates what a unique impact Johnson has had. He was found to have misled Parliament too, but that pales against the sense that his presence at those parties was an act of emotional vandalism against the nation. You don’t need to know about policy differences. You just need to know that. And whatever the truth of “those” PPE and Covid contracts, the perception is that senior figures in the Government colluded in cronyism on a literally industrial scale while the rest of us suffered.
Morality explains the willingness of anti-Tory voters to act with such discipline in by-elections. You can’t be coerced or tricked into voting tactically. Only a gut-level reaction could mobilise forces to that extent and with that uniformity. Those defeats were a protest against the malaise of a mid-term administration, but against the “hurt” inflicted by a few bad actors. The Lib Dems are beneficiaries by default, having become ostensibly a repository for Tories who can no longer hold their nose.
In the same period, the administrations of Johnson, Truss and Sunak undermined the bedrock of traditional associations that are supposed to constitute Conservative morality itself, especially with their animus towards the civil service and legal establishment. While failing ministers fire blame like grapeshot at anyone in range, Britons feel that the island on which they live more resembles the Raft of the Medusa than the hi-tech floating Laputa promised in 2019.
When the leadership attempted to derail the Parliamentary Standards process over Owen Paterson’s clear breach of lobbying rules — or the cover up and denials about Chris Pincher’s conduct before he was appointed Deputy Chief Whip — it did not so much suggest sleaze as a disregard for basic levels of decency. All this ramps up the sense that Tory MPs are the kind of people who would stop in the street by a homeless person, not to offer loose change, but to correct the spelling on their cardboard sign.
Then there’s the Rwanda migrant scheme, certainly stupid and unworkable, but what lingers is the sheer wrongness of it. The message of levelling up’s failure to deliver is not bad policy, but broken promises. This Government has an uncanny knack of pissing people off. Oscar Wilde wrote, “Morality is simply the attitude we adopt towards people whom we personally dislike.” On the basis of Sunak’s latest favourability ratings, start preparing for judgement day.
