After a summer of policy setbacks and missed targets, and with an election looming, Rishi Sunak is likely to view the return of parliament next week with anxiety. But at least he is in a position to tell his party and his ministers a few home truths with confidence.
Three stand out. Trailing in the polls by about 20%, the Tory party urgently needs to start winning back the voters that it has lost to Labour and the Liberal Democrats. Amid the cost of living crisis, management of the economy will again be the key electoral battlefield. And, in volatile times, the party more than ever needs to speak with one voice and end its internal conflicts.
Mr Sunak’s twin problem is that he lacks the authority to enforce the message, and that many in his party are not listening anyway. Many MPs have given up already. Nadine Dorries’s intemperate resignation letter at the weekend is an extreme example of a wider problem. Much of the Tory party now dismisses her letter as sour grapes at not getting a peerage. But it is not quite so simple.
Amid its pervasive spite, the letter, accusing Mr Sunak of presiding over a zombie parliament and of taking the public for fools, nevertheless lands some genuine blows. As she says, the Sunak government seems to have given up on levelling up. Social care reform has also been largely abandoned. Green commitments have indeed been marginalised. As a result, key parts of the Tories’ 2019 electoral coalition – the economically deprived, elderly people and the young – have been alienated.
Where Ms Dorries is emphatically wrong is over two important things. The first is her obviously false claim that the Tory party’s problems only started with the ousting of Boris Johnson in 2022. The second is Ms Dorries’s eye-popping conflation of Mr Johnson’s three-year reign with traditional Conservatism. “You have abandoned the fundamental principles of Conservatism,” she berates Mr Sunak in her letter. Yet no one looking at Mr Johnson’s opportunist record could possibly say that he was a fundamentalist Tory, while few of those who might accept such a label for themselves would dream of seeing Mr Johnson as a kindred spirit.
The truth is that the Conservative party’s actual problem is very nearly the reverse of what Ms Dorries claims. In reality, a combination of Mr Johnson’s Brexit populism and Liz Truss’s caricature of Thatcherism have wrecked whatever consensus may once have existed about the fundamentals of British Conservatism.
That view is reinforced by several books due for publication this autumn from a range of Tory voices. In his book, the Devizes MP, Danny Kruger, offers a mix of libertarianism and ultra-traditionalism as the core Tory creed. Another, edited by the former justice secretary David Gauke, with contributions from Amber Rudd and Michael Heseltine, says the party has abandoned its roots in the mainstream centre-right. A third, by Theresa May, claims abuse of power and a decline in public service are the central problems. In a fourth, Rory Stewart argues that Tory politics has become fatally detached from the lives of voters.
These are not voices from within a party that agrees on what it stands for or loves what it knows. They are the voices of a party squabbling in the rubble. Mr Sunak may want to bring them into line. But the truth is that the Tory party has lost its instinct for winning and even for survival.
