One way of making sense of current events within the British Conservative party is to think of them as the unravelling of the changes that Boris Johnson had wreaked. It’s true that the repudiation of the Cameron era in the immediate aftermath of the EU referendum in 2016 opened the door to reheated Thatcherism, the much hoped for Singapore-on-Thames as Britain’s post-EU future. At the same time, there was an awareness among some, including Theresa May, that the 2016 vote signalled something far more profound: a revolt by voters against a political class that had abandoned them. This called for a more interventionist state, tackling searing regional inequalities, finally trying to fix the mess of British vocational training – themes and policies quite alien to the soul of the Tory party.
The Johnson-Cummings-Gove team in operation from the summer of 2019 pursued this second agenda, with dramatic effect when Johnson won an enormous majority in the December election. The neo-Thatcherites did not disappear; indeed, they formed a core part of Johnson’s government. But they were ideologically isolated, forced to swallow the political pivot towards “levelling up” and the Tory party’s electoral embrace of working-class northern voters.
