The home secretary, queen of the anti-woke, is gone, again. Her grandstanding infuriated many colleagues, yet most of them share the same sinking life-raft of current Tory thinking. “I wouldn’t use her words,” each minister says, but they share her thoughts. Reshuffle from what to what?
The tide is going out on the conservatism they were bred on, the last ripples of Thatcherism that nurtured them leaving them all marooned on an extremist island. Suella Braverman’s backers, such as the Daily Mail, Telegraph and Sun, which 20 years ago seemed to have a direct line to the beating heart of Tory middle England, are now adrift. And there is no sign that sacking her and reviving the Greensill-tarnished David Cameron will help: austerity’s author arrives to great public alarm as his policy crushes public services. Only 24% of voters feel favourably towards him, with nearly twice as many against.
Something else happened on Armistice Day – just as full of symbolism for the future of conservatism, in its way, as a Tory home secretary barely criticising yobs throwing punches beside the Cenotaph in the name of “Ingerland till I die”. Here’s another scene emblematic of Tory irrelevance. Saturday’s National Trust AGM at the steam museum in Swindon had its ructions too, with hecklings and flouncings out. Restore Trust, a rebel rightwing faction against the NT’s mainstream, put up its candidates for the governing council, including the august former supreme court judge and historian Jonathan Sumption, the rightwing journalist Andrew Gimson and others. Determined to “shift the focus away from identity politics”, it accused the trust of “promoting a self-hating conception of history” after a report detailed 93 NT properties with connections to colonialism and slavery. The insurgents attacked the trust’s net-zero environment policies too, accusing it of playing politics, dangerous for a charity. But despite a vigorous social-media campaign run by a former Liz Truss campaigner, the rebels lost. Not one of their slate was elected: polling shows the NT has a very high trust ranking of 71% with the public.
Yet again the culture warriors lose because the public rejects them, unmoved by their eccentric and malevolent obsessions, irritated by their political weaponising of everything. The Tories should note that the trust has 5 million members, its council representing other colossal charities, such as the CPRE (the countryside charity formerly known as the Campaign to Protect Rural England), the RSPB, English Heritage, the Wildlife Trusts, the Woodland Trust and others. Here are the massed ranks of middle England – and they are modern, progressive and resistant to culture-war nonsense. Alongside heritage, they are concerned about the climate, human rights and an honest representation of history, as perceptions change through the generations. But the Tories have vacated this normal world, “the party and the people now passing each other like ships in the night”, says Robert Ford, a professor of political science. And they may not meet again for a very long time.
But I doubt a deep understanding of any of that is behind Braverman’s expulsion. Her final provocation – attacking the police as being politically biased for refusing to ban a lawfully organised protest – meant her future depended on being proved right: she needed the pro-Palestinian “hate marches” to turn violent. “Pray they don’t end up with a riot at the Cenotaph”, splashed the Daily Mail, plainly yearning for mayhem to vindicate her. The Met commissioner, Mark Rowley, deserves a medal for standing firm for the right to protest, at great risk to his reputation. Everyone waited to see if a riot would prove her right and him wrong. Politically, she needed trouble.
She got it, but not from the relatively peaceful pro-Palestinian marchers, despite some toxic antisemitic chants and placards. Instead, the trouble came from the shock troops of thugs who were encouraged by her disgraceful accusations of police favouritism towards leftist and Black Lives Matter protesters. She chose to “sow the seeds of hatred”, said Keir Starmer. All this has been a blessing for Labour, taking its own painful internal conflict over a Gaza ceasefire out of the news.
Shuffling the old dogeared pack changes little: they are all in it together. This sacking signals that Rishi Sunak has abandoned those briefly loaned red-wall seats. Old Etonian Cameron’s Lazarus, rising from the political grave, signals a desperate attempt to rescue traditional blue seats. Only recently Cameron savaged Sunak for axing HS2, but needs must when confronting the loss of swathes of home counties constituencies. Education is to blame, says Ford, whose forthcoming research exposes the depth of Tory electoral woe. Graduates are already the largest group in every cohort under the age of 50 – and they are social liberals. “The Tory vote is evaporating, and it won’t come back,” he says. Conservative majorities relied on school leavers, an older dying breed of the less educated, while the young no longer turn Tory as they age. He says the Tories won’t recover until they appeal to graduates: naturally, Tories now want to cut university places.
Braverman and the party deputy chair, Lee Anderson, may be loudmouths, but they voice the thoughts of a party that has been marching rightwards for a long time. For years, only candidates swearing allegiance to Brexit and other rightwing nostrums had a chance of selection. Look how many MPs chose Boris Johnson, then Liz Truss, to put to their members. There’s barely a shred of difference now between most Tory MPs and Nigel Farage: the beleaguered little One Nation group is lucky not to have been exiled like David Gauke and Dominic Grieve. If Sunak is ejected, it will be because he’s a loser, not because his political instincts differ from most of his MPs.
This week, a large and detailed Survation poll showed Labour winning a bigger landslide than in 1997. It revealed the three top concerns in each constituency: the cost of living, the NHS and the economy, almost everywhere. No 10 plans a mighty boast for halving the inflation rate, but people will still see the price of everything rising. Culture wars are supposed to distract people from their cost of living pain. It doesn’t work. Nor will reshuffling the cabinet deckchairs.
Braverman’s type of anti-woke warfare repels moderate Tory voters, Liberal Democrats find, picking it up on erstwhile Tory doorsteps. But she is only one among many who have shape-shifted into a party indistinguishable from the likes of Farage, with their revolutionary assaults on every element of the establishment that the old Tory party once used to conserve. Attacking the independence of the police echoes “enemies of the people” assaults on an independent judiciary, along with their universal loathing of the BBC, the NHS, local councils, the civil service and charities. These new nihilists will never win elections.
Polly Toynbee is a Guardian columnist
