It was an event intended to mark the reinvigoration of rightwing conservatism. But even before the first speaker took to the stage on Tuesday morning, the Popular Conservatism group had splintered.
Of the four MPs billed to speak, just two were present – Liz Truss and Jacob Rees-Mogg. The former cabinet minister Ranil Jayawardena, regarded by some as a rising star of the Tory right, pulled out on Monday with a swipe at his fellow panellists. And Simon Clarke, another Trussite former cabinet minister, was removed from the line-up by the organisers two weeks ago after calling for Rishi Sunak to be ousted.
“This isn’t about the leadership of Rishi Sunak,” the director Mark Littlewood, who until recently led the Institute of Economic Affairs, told the room. “I’m personally immovable in my view that Rishi Sunak should lead the Conservatives into the next general election.”
But although none of the speakers openly questioned Sunak’s leadership, much of the rest of the event amounted to an evisceration of his policies.
The former Conservative party vice-chair Lee Anderson attacked the government over its approach to net zero. He called for coal mines to be reopened in the north of England and for people to be able to choose whether to pay green levies on their energy bills.
“We’re burning coal in our power stations but it’s foreign coal,” he said. “How is that contributing to net zero? It’s an absolute nonsense.” He also said his constituents weren’t “lying awake at night worrying about net zero”.
The parliamentary candidate Mhairi Fraser, who is standing in Chris Grayling’s safe Tory seat of Epsom and Ewell, launched an extended attack on Sunak’s smoking ban and the Covid lockdowns.
She said the ban would create a “ludicrous two-tier system where in the years to come a 50-year-old man will be able to legally buy his cigarettes but his 49-year-old wife will not”.
“Once one freedom is surrendered, other freedoms follow, because the state is no Mary Poppins,” she said. “Let us never forget the nanny in her most monstrous form – the Covid lockdowns .… It’s time to put nanny to bed.”
Rees-Mogg declared that the “age of Davos man is over” and Truss urged her colleagues to stop worrying about getting a job in Sunak’s government and take the fight to “left-wing extremists” running UK institutions instead.
Truss claimed these included “environmentalists” and those who are “in favour of supporting LGBT people or groups of ethnic minorities”.
Lord Gavin Barwell, former chief of staff to Theresa May, called for Truss to lose the Tory whip for those remarks. He said: “Liz Truss has done more than enough damage to the Conservative party already. She should apologise for this offensive nonsense or lose the whip.” This would force her to sit as an independent MP in the Commons.
The Popular Conservatism group also aims to pile pressure on the prime minister to cut taxes, to adopt hardline policies on immigration and to leave the European convention on human rights.
Many Tory MPs on the right of the party decided to stay away. “I’m not sure what space this is meant to fill,” one MP said privately. “The Conservative Growth Group already advocates libertarian economics. The Common Sense Conservatives talk about cultural issues.”
Meanwhile Kwasi Kwarteng – formerly Truss’s chancellor and closest political ally – pointedly decided to announce that he will not be seeking re-election as an MP.
One person who was present was the former Brexit party leader Nigel Farage, in his capacity as a GB News presenter. A few years ago, Tories found to be associating with him risked suspension from the party – but on Tuesday attendees were lining up to take pictures with him.
Farage said he was not seeking to join the Conservatives, “given what they stand for”, but he did not rule out standing for parliament with Richard Tice’s party, Reform. “I suspect I would agree with a lot of what is said on the platform this morning, but none of it is going to be Conservative manifesto policy,” he said. “Whilst there were some big names like Liz Truss, Jacob Rees-Mogg – I saw Priti Patel coming into the audience earlier – they are a very small minority within the parliamentary Conservative party.”
Labour and the Liberal Democrats mocked the new Tory grouping. The shadow paymaster general, Jonathan Ashworth, wrote to the panellists on Monday night asking whether they still supported unfunded tax cuts and the use of offshore tax havens. The Lib Dems published a social media graphic of the Top of the Pop[Con]s “greatest hits” – including Common (Etonian) People and It’s the End of the Tories As We Know It (And I Feel Fine).
Unfazed, Truss insisted; “Britain is full of secret Conservatives – people who agree with us but don’t want to admit it because they think it’s not acceptable in their place of work, it’s not acceptable at their school.”
Littlewood said the Popular Conservatives, or PopCons, would be taking their arguments to voters around the country. The response they get will be a test of Truss’s claims.
