The spectacle of the shipwrecked Conservative party is a wonder to behold. Boris Johnson the destroyer will carry on sinking the remains of the galleon he once captained – out of sheer revenge. Cabals of every rightwing complexion include the old bastards of yesteryear – John Redwood still at it – and new red-wallers seeing their brief careers vanish before their eyes. Whipping and dangling ministerial office no longer work as the necessary force holding the party together.
Johnson loyalists may be few, but their noise is amplified by a Tory press infected with the same virus, bewailing his departure. Newly knighted Jacob Rees-Mogg writes in the Mail on Sunday that Johnson is “in pole position for a future leadership contest”. Johnson ally James Duddridge tells the Telegraph, “He will be back. Full stop. As a matter of fact.” Nigel Farage claims he is in talks with Johnson aides to set up a new party to “defend the Brexit legacy”. Jake Berry tweets in fury, “You voted for Brexit – the establishment blocked it. You voted for @BorisJohnson – the establishment has forced him out. Who is in charge here … The voters or the blob?”
Fantasy or not, such outbursts get megaphone treatment from those taking Johnson’s popularity on his own assessment, as laid out in his resignation letter: “When I left office last year the government was only a handful of points behind in the polls. That gap has now massively widened.” Not so. He was ousted because Labour was 11 points ahead, widened now to 16. Johnson’s personal ratings are abysmal: Ipsos’s Ben Page says he tops the list of prime ministers who did a “bad job”.
But the Torysphere has its fingers in its ears, not listening to voters, obsessed by woke conspiracies, blobs, remainers, the “establishment”, the liberal elite or any other “them” they can find to avoid looking in the mirror. They are the cause of their own downfall.
You might think this is only the usual turmoil that happens when the pendulum swings against a government too long in power. But this time it’s different. Under its feet the ground is shaking, tectonic plates are on the move, all its belief systems are crumbling. The aftershocks of a financial crash, austerity, Covid and Brexit have set off a tidal wave sweeping away four decades of the Thatcher creed that has dominated the Tory party since her reign. The party is stranded on a far shore, with too few believers ever to return to power on a raft of those old ideas.
The Thatcher revolution of 1979 left a long legacy, its chickens coming home to roost one by one. Just about every one of her totemic policies is profoundly unpopular now. Sewage has been such a good metaphor for utility privatisations, with energy companies equally reviled. The loss of 4m council homes, unreplaced, is keenly felt. The “big bang” ignited dangerous dependence on finance and an explosion in obscene top salaries. Her industrial sabotage still resonates in desolate, left-behind zones; industrial policy, meanwhile, is popular, with investment in green growth, gigafactories, wind turbines, carbon capture and green hydrogen no longer dismissed as “picking winners”.
Only old ideologues believe Thatcher’s mantra that all this should be “left to the markets”. Her outsourcing of services deliberately avoided trade unions, cementing the bottom half of wages to the floor. She caused inequality to soar, never to return to its 1970s level, with hard-won working rights lost to zero-hours contracts, a gig economy and freelance insecurity. Yet, despite the recent strikes, more people think unions play a positive rather than a negative role in Britain today.
David Cameron and George Osborne’s austerity was inspired by Thatcher: the smaller the state the better, they insisted. For decades, the UK collected far less tax than equivalent EU countries – and now pays a heavy price in a failing NHS, social care, education and everything else. But Tory MPs are blind to the seismic change in public attitudes: they put their faith in Sunak’s promised tax cuts as the party’s salvation, expecting a 2p income tax cut next March, and demanding more. Polling in key seats shows that that is no life raft, however. Just 12% prefer cutting taxes and spending less on public services, with 38% wanting to keep tax and spending as they are. Another 36% want taxes raised, with more spent on public services. Labour will be wary of trusting such public altruism, but it shows an extraordinary shift in sentiment, with Labour being more trusted on solid economic management. After the crash, austerity, Brexit and Covid, the public is rejecting old Thatcherite nostrums.
Michael Ashcroft’s polling for the Mail on Sunday shows that people are most concerned about the cost of living and the NHS, followed equally by the economy and climate change. Yet the current Tory trope is that net zero should be dropped as unpopular. Immigration is not in the top five issues, with Brexit now marked as a negative against the Tories, says Ashcroft. Brexit broke their party and it may take a political generation to get it out of their bloodstream, while the young who voted overwhelmingly to remain will not forgive or forget.
Brexit’s only blessing is that it may have vaccinated the UK against the nationalist populist wave sweeping some countries. Now Britain has seen the Brexit fallout, even if not quite Bregretters, it’s hard to imagine any UK demagogue winning on an isolationist, Little England, pull-up-the-drawbridge message. Courtesy of Boris Johnson, we’ve been there, done it, and learned our lesson.
Onward, a Tory one-nation thinktank, warns of the party’s existential collapse. Millennials are the first demographic cohort not to become more likely to vote Conservative as they age, they find, and “this situation is worsening.” Each cohort is more educated, and the more educated are less likely to vote Tory, or turn Tory later, either.
Campaign group Next Gen Tories, trying to win that cohort back, says: “Age is the new dividing line in politics. It is now a stronger indication of voting intention than class, gender or race. For every 10 years younger a person is, they are nine points less likely to vote Conservative.” It is a culturally different generation: more green, less capitalist as they have less capital of their own, sunk by childcare costs, needing good, affordable state nurseries and services.
Though none of this guarantees the permanent triumph of social democracy, Labour needs to seize the monumental meaning of this turning point. This is not 1997, when Thatcherism still had to be accommodated. This is 1979 reversed. Don’t expect the speakers contending to be their idol’s heir at Monday’s Margaret Thatcher conference to face the fact that Thatcherism is finally dead, her policies electorally toxic. The party that selected Johnson and Liz Truss, the party with Suella Braverman as home secretary, will be a long time recovering. The party in which every candidate to be an MP has to worship at the Thatcher shrine may take many election losses to flush Thatcherism and Brexit out of their veins before they can re-emerge as an electably modern, internationalist, one-nation Conservative party.
Polly Toynbee is a Guardian columnist
