Righteous indignation is an appropriate response to bad government, except when it comes from the cabinet, in which case it is absurd. Suella Braverman is right that the failure of police to investigate thefts is “completely unacceptable” and the comment would have been a stinging rebuke to the relevant minister if it had come from someone other than the home secretary herself.
Denouncing policy failure from the pulpit of incumbency has become a speciality of the Tory right. Lee Anderson, deputy chair of the party, says immigration is “out of control”. A chorus of backbench MPs laments that high taxes are suffocating economic growth. The Conservative party is appalled by the state of a country it has been governing for the past 13 years. Who could be responsible?
There are numerous candidates: the opposition, lawyers, judges (European and domestic), immigrants, charities, environmental activists, the BBC, the civil service, universities, the Office for Budget Responsibility or some shapeless confederacy of them all: the malignant “blob”.
But even that formidable alliance should not rival the power of a determined government under visionary leadership. There must be debilitation on the inside, too. The rot starts at the top.
That is the conclusion reached by Nadine Dorries in a resignation letter, published over the weekend, relinquishing the parliamentary seat she had notionally quit in June.
After a preamble celebrating her achievements as a minister in Boris Johnson’s cabinet, Dorries explains that she is stepping down in order to expose “the machinations of a small group of individuals embedded deep at the centre of the party and Downing Street”. Hers is a “dark” and “disturbing” tale that begins with the “political assassination” of Johnson (the subject of Dorries’ forthcoming book). The same regicidal cabal then “took down” Liz Truss (as if her downfall had no better explanation). The sinister “onslaught” was perpetrated by “forces” who “are today the most powerful figures in the land”, whose purpose was the undemocratic installation of Rishi Sunak in Downing Street “without a single vote”.
Dorries’ letter itemises a range of mainstream Conservative gripes – failure to ignite the bonfire of EU legislation, for example – but its tone is too personal and self-regarding to speak for anyone other than the author. Most Tory MPs find the histrionics embarrassing. Ultra-loyalists of the deposed Johnson regime are a dwindled faction.
And yet the Dorries letter illuminates the Tory predicament in ways that the former MP for Mid Bedfordshire didn’t intend. It eloquently conveys the moment of elision where disillusioned Conservatism, swerving self-criticism, blends into conspiracy theory.
The idea of Sunak as the beneficiary of a plot to subvert the will of the people is self-evidently unhinged to anyone who followed the chaotic unravelling of Johnson’s rule and the ruinous Truss interregnum. But it is also an extrapolation from two more common ideas. First, that the government is only unpopular because it has ceased to be authentically Conservative. Second, its accomplishments are too few because of obstacles put in its path by an entrenched liberal leftwing Establishment.
That analysis shapes the thinking of many Tory MPs. It will set the tone for Sunak’s general election campaign because it is the only explanation for underachievement that doesn’t require contrition from the ruling party.
If that election is lost, as looks likely, the audit of failure will be painful. Many Conservatives will cope with defeat by groping deeper into the shadows of conspiracy.
Sunak’s friends will try to cast him as an able administrator who strove to restore competence but was unable to reverse a tide that had turned before he took office. But the parable of the valiant caretaker lacks any honest articulation of what caused the mess he was supposed to be clearing up.
No one pulls on that thread because it leads by way of Truss to Johnson and from Johnson back to Brexit. Then the whole shoddy weave comes undone. Individual pride is one impediment to candour, but there are also ideological currents at work.
One is the difficulty Conservatives have tackling the social impact of economic inequality when they start from doctrinal opposition to anything that looks like wealth redistribution. That is why Johnson’s levelling up agenda never got any practical purchase on Tory policymaking.
A party that dares not incriminate markets in its analysis of unfairness, and that refuses to grasp the levers of tax-and-spend to engineer equal opportunities, looks instead to grievance rooted in culture and identity. That is the appeal of “anti-woke” campaigns.
It is true that academia, Whitehall and creative industries are over populated with humanities graduates with opinions to the left of the median voter. That divide is real enough. It is also true that making a scapegoat of cultural elites is easier than confronting economic elites, especially for a party that stays solvent through the good graces of rich donors. That dynamic is accelerated by the absence of tangible benefits from Brexit, which was sold as redress for economic and cultural alienation.
When revolutions fail to build utopias it can never be the architects’ fault. Instead there is the automatic recourse to blaming saboteurs and hunting traitors. So it was with Marxist regimes. So it has been with Tory Eurosceptics, and so it will continue for as long as there is any compromise with European neighbours that leaves some morsel of sovereignty theoretically vulnerable to continental capture.
Brexit is a peculiarly British expression of a cycle that is not confined to British conservatism, nor unique to the right. It is the contradiction inherent in all populism once it graduates from insurgency to government. A party that claims to seek power on behalf of the people and against corrupt elites ends up reliant on the enduring potency of that elite to explain why its policies aren’t working.
Failure inflates the myth of an all-powerful enemy, which begets bad policy, which fails, confirming the strength of the invisible foe. This is the conveyor from ideology to conspiracy theory. It is the seductive key that unlocks political frustration without a requirement to revise deeply held beliefs. It follows its own internal logic, reassuringly insulated from countervailing evidence.
Sunak is not riding that conveyor but he is watching it whisk his party along and he lacks the courage to disrupt it. He may think Dorries’ explanation for why and when things went wrong for the Tories is deranged. But her narration is no less coherent than the prime minister’s reticence on the subject. Downing Street will be relieved to see her leave parliament but the habit of paranoid denial that she represents, the Dorries syndrome, will linger in the Conservative party for years.
Rafael Behr is a Guardian columnist
