American conservatism holds no answers for the future of the Tory party

The Conservative party is behaving as if it is heading into opposition. For all the prime minister’s pleas to unite behind him, every member of his parliamentary party is freelancing and identifying with rival factions, trying to position themselves for the aftermath of the general election defeat. 

Tory party members are as narcissistic as their representatives, prematurely toying with who they will vote for as party leader “after Sunak”. Not that we know how many of them there are because membership figures have not been released for years. There must be an element of mortality gripping the Tory tribe. Analysis suggests that you now need to be in your late sixties to be more likely to vote Conservative.

Opinion polling for the Conservatives is so dire that being “only” 5 per cent behind in some rural areas is hailed as “good news”. In the public mind, the Sunak family are already booked on a one-way first-class flight to California early next year.

In the event of defeat big changes in the party are a certainty. Losing Tory leaders don’t stick around. But even if the Conservatives somehow, almost miraculously, find themselves still in power after the election it seems unlikely that the in-fighting will stop. The Tories have developed such a taste for their own blood – five leaders in eight years – that the factional wars will wage on, win or lose. 

Conservative supporting media outlets are already fizzing with lists of candidates to take over. The latest straw poll of party members by ConservativeHome on “the next leader after Sunak” is headed from the top down by Kemi Badenoch, Penny Mordaunt, Suella Braverman, James Cleverly, Tom Tughendhat, Grant Shapps, Robert Jenrick and Priti Patel. 

Significantly there is no such public speculation about the next Labour leader. Sir Keir Starmer still seems to have the future before him. Over 60 per cent of ConservativeHome’s survey panel now anticipate a majority Labour government.

Confirming the uncertainty about the direction in which the Conservative party is heading, even this list of possible next leaders, which is limited to those eligible under the rules by being MPs, is incomplete. Liz Truss, enjoys a healthy majority in South West Norfolk and is not ruling out a comeback, riding on a populist wave. She draws some parallels to “1974” though whether she means the second coming of Harold Wilson or the stirring of Thatcherism is a mystery. 

Then there are the “posh boys” now outside the Commons. Boris Johnson remains a favourite of the party faithful, if not the nation as a whole. The possible re-election of Donald Trump in November would certainly fit boosters to the Boris Redux narrative. George Osborne has mischievously suggested that Starmer might like to keep on his old pal Lord Cameron as Foreign Secretary in a government of all the talents. Ambition has not burnt out in the breasts of either Dave or George. 

The loose centre-left coalition of the dispossessed in the Conservative party – including Cameroons and One Nation Tories – do not think it will be easy to get back their party from “the nutters”. In a mirror image of Starmer’s appeal for two terms to put the nation back on its feet, they reckon it will take another hardcore leader, and a second election defeat, to shock the Conservative party back to sanity. This actually amounts to an expression of quiet confidence in a speedy upturn in Conservative fortunes. It has taken four lost elections to knock Labour back into potentially election-winning shape. 

Some fear an extinction-level event at the next election, akin to the collapse of the Progressive Conservative Party in Canada in 1993, from absolute majority government to just two seats. The moral of that story is that a Conservative party will not go away. The Progressive Conservatives soon merged with Reform – their rivals on the right and a clue to the latest party name chosen by Nigel Farage. From 2006 the rebranded Conservatives were back in power in Canada for a decade, under Prime Minister Stephen Harper. 

The Tories governed Britain for sixty-five years of the last century, and, so far, for fourteen out of the twenty-five years of this one. There is not much evidence to discredit the old sore that this is “a Conservative country which occasionally votes Labour”. 

The debate now is what sort of Conservatism we will get. With the partial exception of Mordaunt, who looks in most peril of losing her seat, the women making the running in the Tory leadership are offering different degrees of the same rhetoric: tax-cutting, anti-immigrant, authoritarian toward those they do not like and permissive towards their sponsors. 

This is not much different to what Sunak is already trying to do, with no sign that it has mass appeal to the electorate.  No Conservatives can wipe away their last fourteen years in power: high taxes and decaying public services and the fact, whatever the ideology and the “will of the people”, that the Brexit they facilitated has damaged the material well-being of every citizen. 

UnSunakian stridency however is what appeals to Lord Frost, The Daily Telegraph and GB News – and could yet do the trick in a leadership contest although that may well depend on how things pan out in the US election this year. Tories may be tempted to think that right-wing populism is working for Trump, why not try it here? 

To which there are many rebuttals. Europe is not America. No viable party here has been captured to the same extent by one individual. Orban and Meloni have both had to moderate in office. The populist right seems set to make gains in June’s European Parliament elections but no one expects it will dominate. 

No British political leader is prepared to go as far as Trump, who has said immigrants “are poisoning the blood of our country”. Some on the right have flirted with similar themes. “Stop the boats”, loaded with illegal migrants, is a Tory slogan. But when Lee Anderson and Suella Braverman tested the limits of acceptable anti-Muslim rhetoric, the former lost her place in the Cabinet and the latter had the whip suspended.

Besides, Trump has not won yet. That is why Nikki Haley is staying in the race. Age and mental and physical health could force Trump or Biden out. At any moment. Trump also faces mounting legal and financial difficulties.

There is a credible argument that the more Trump “energises his base” the less likely he makes victory in November. That at least is the view of the veteran US news anchor Dan Rather, admittedly rather liberal, who tweeted following Trump’s “crushing” win in the South Carolina primary: “Everything he’s doing to fire up his MAGA voters makes him less palatable to the independents he needs to win the general. Bad news for his MAGA base  – largely white, very conservative, older, male very evangelical election deniers, which pollsters say is about 33% of the electorate – is that in November they alone can not bring him over the line.”

The UK is not the US but there are parallels in terms of the balance of the electorate. Tory wannabes, slavering to take over their party after expected defeat, need to reflect more carefully if they are to win again.   

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