“I want to scare the shit out of you,” Frank Luntz, a focus-grouper to the US right, proclaimed to the Tory party audience. He hardly needed to. “You know the average age of the Labour voter? 38-40. The average age of the Tory voter? Deceased.” Nervous laughs. At every “whither the future” event, speakers quote the YouGov poll showing only 1% of 18-24s back their party. For under-50s, it’s barely better. The very word “Conservative” is poison and young cohorts are staying with Labour as they age.
Tory afflictions will fill Labour with glee this week. So many fractions of factions and so many contenders jostling for a bald man’s comb, amid wails of the wiser who know it’s almost all over. Like the ancient mariner, they pluck the sleeve of any passing journo to spill their tales of woe, no holding back.
Rishi Sunak’s latest YouGov rating is his worst yet: 23% view him favourably, 68% unfavourably – the party’s reputation is no better than it was under his predecessors. “He has completely failed to rescue his party,” writes the former YouGov president Peter Kellner. Just look at this: the Tories score 12% for competence, 8% for trustworthiness, 14% for trying to do the right thing, and 5% for being in touch.
The damage is deep and permanent. By the election, prices will still be rising, with austerity, empty purses, food bank shame and NHS near-collapse no better than now, whatever the headlines on slowing inflation. Public memory of the disgraceful Boris Johnson hardly needs the reminder from Channel 4’s factual drama Partygate, which will show how disgusting were those 15 parties recorded by Sue Gray, with puking, fighting and drunken, entitled toff special advisers mocking those forced to let their grandparents die alone.
The only whistling in the dark comes from those who are eagerly awaiting electoral cataclysm to seize a leadership that looks about as appetising as a cyanide pill. The catch-22 is that anyone who wants it must by definition be unfit.
The near-certainty of defeat seems to liberate the party from all constraint, unleashing the freedom to plunge as far right as it likes, free to ignore public opinion. The noise all comes from the right, with the top contenders Suella Braverman and Kemi Badenoch turning an exit from the European court of human rights into their new Brexit drumbeat. Groupuscules launch their own manifestos, such as the Northern Research Group and the New Conservatives, the party’s moral army. Noises off from Johnson blustering over HS2’s expected amputation remind those here that he stands ready to serve. About 30 Tory MPs have signed a pledge to never again vote for a tax rise. “Unleash your inner Conservative,” cries Liz Truss to her packed hall, calling for tax cuts and a small state, still unabashed, her faith undaunted in the unfettered free markets that crashed her out of power. How was Nigel Farage allowed in, cameras trailing him everywhere? It’s his party and he knows it. No wonder there are notably few businesses here: many more have booked into Labour.
Out there, 2019’s mercurial coalition of so-called red- and-blue-wallers crumbles: the symbolism of lopping limbs off HS2 is a mortal blow to morale in the north, while southern discomfort assails blue wallers who want the green belt preserved and sewage-free rivers, and are repelled by the Tories’ current “Vote blue, pour weedkiller on green” approach. Forging this dividing line with Labour will probably backfire when the great majority of voters are deeply alarmed by the climate threat. Voters may indeed worry about the cost of net zero, but they can see the cynicism of these irresponsibles ignoring it.
Why would anyone aspire to lead this rabble? If the prime minister is indeed an intelligent, diligent and serious man, what was he doing appointing Braverman as home secretary or Lee Anderson as deputy chairman, encouraging this flight to the right? Either he’s a coward, afraid of the bully wing of his party, or he wants useful outriders to speak the unspeakable, which is shameful. Or else he agrees with them. He may be as rich as Midas, but his touch turns everything to dross.
There is no sign anywhere of a shining knight galloping up to restore something resembling the electable conservatism of the old party before it was devoured by Ukip. It’s curious how many groups claim to be the “centre-right”.
The Centre for Policy Studies and its rightwing CapX blog’s event, “Can the centre-right survive?”, was misleading: on any historic scale their like, with Daniel Hannan and Luntz on the panel, would have been firmly on the party’s right. “Scaring the shit” out of the audience, they warned how far the public has moved leftwards after the bankers’ crash and Covid-19, when only the state was there to save us all. Hannan calls the pandemic “the single most transformative event of our lives”, altering “the chemistry of the brains” of the public, pulling it towards statism. He says it with a shudder, without remedies for hauling voters back to the right.
The authentic centre-right gathered, beleaguered, in a small room to hear David Gauke talk about his book, The Case for the Centre Right, a collection of essays by one-nation Tories. He was of his party’s right, he says, when first elected – but when the party turned Brexit, the shifting ground beneath his feet landed him on its left. He was expelled, but would rejoin if sanity ever prevailed. Reading these moderate essays and listening to Gauke against the prevailing rightwing tsunami at this conference, that day will be a very long way off. The great barrier is Brexit: without an honest reckoning at some point, the party will stay Ukip at heart.
Amid all this, the chancellor plods on with traditional Tory politics as usual: there will be tax cuts yet, but in the budget before the election, he has signalled. Paid for how? By that other very traditional Tory move, cutting benefits for unemployed slackers, incentivising them with a rise in the minimum wage. Does bashing those on benefits have the magic it did in olden times? It now runs counter to that post-Covid sentiment in the latest British social attitudes survey, revealing new public sympathy for life’s strugglers. But give the man credit: Hunt is the only speaker I heard naming an actual cut in public spending, amid the gaseous calls for a smaller state.
Labour may revel in its enemy’s slide towards oblivion. The further right the Tories go, the more beatable they look in the short term. But it should be careful what it wishes for, as the silence of the vanishing one-nation moderates is ominous. When the Tory civil war begins in earnest post-election, the moderate platoon looks frighteningly invisible. Some day this party will be back, and Labour should hope it will not be in an even darker incarnation.
Polly Toynbee is a Guardian columnist
