Last week I argued that the economic and political consequences of ‘No Deal’ were likely to cause serious problems for the Conservative Party. A legitimate point was made by some friends that the electoral consequences of betraying the ‘will of the people’ on Brexit would be equally severe.
It says something that we are debating whether a man-made recession is worth it or not. But the point deserves scrutiny nonetheless.
The dilemma facing the Prime Minister going into the autumn is clear.
On the one hand, she can erode the party’s membership and current vote by compromising on the campaign promises of Vote Leave – and which she then promised to implement in October 2016.
On the other, she can push ahead with ‘no deal’ and commit the country to a period of economic uncertainty at best and longer-term economic dislocation at worst.
To put it crudely: break the party or hurt the country (the latter of which I suspect will break the party anyway).
It’s a choice, that with the benefit of hindsight, was made inevitable by the primary colour way in which she chose to define Brexit in the months immediately after the referendum. The strident tone of her Sunday conference speech in October 2016 was significantly harder in tone and substance than the words of Boris Johnson and Michael Gove in the hours immediately after the referendum result. It was a strategic mis-step brought about because politics is about defining legitimacy as much as anything else – and she was sensitive to accusations that she was a ‘Remainer in disguise’.
But I digress. A genuinely difficult decision now presents itself. The current crop of party strategists should be under no illusions about the gravity of the moment – and its implications for our ability to construct a majority in the years to come.
There is a way through the quandary but it will not lie in the white heat of the Brexit debate and its passionate intensity. It requires us to step away from the discussion of Chequers, ‘no deal’ and Michel Barnier. We must instead go back to first principles about what the Conservative party has historically been for – and what has underpinned our majorities over the centuries.
On one level, our success has been about the values attached to economic security. And let’s not pretend, it’s also had a lot to do with the values attached to national identity and self-determination. But above all, the party’s electoral majorities have been constructed on a higher truth: that in an uncertain world you can trust the Conservative Party above the others to be responsible leaders and cautious custodians of change.
The most successful Conservatives over the years have achieved magnificent things for the country, well beyond the bluster and rhetoric of the left and centre-left. But they have usually done it through a sense of gradualism about disrupting the system before its time. They have taken the world as it is, surveyed the various suggestions and ideas to improve it – and then implemented the most promising in line with broad principles and values connected to the free market and nation state. Change has been something to manage organically and in accordance with the traditions of the country rather than a dogmatic attachment to a particular ideology.
For all the hagiography of her later years, this was also for true for Margaret Thatcher, who took plenty of undogmatic decisions in the national interest. She paid up to the National Union of Mineworkers in 1981 because coal stocks were not sufficient at the time to withstand a strike. She abandoned her early experiment with monetarism because of the consequences of unemployment. Despite papers being commissioned, she never really progressed with free-market approaches to health and education – because she did not think the public would countenance it.
It is a legitimate (and difficult to categorically disprove) viewpoint that we will eventually realise the benefits of a Hard Brexit in 50 years’ time – but that we may have to cope with a relative amount of economic uncertainty and underperformance until then. It is a very un-Conservative way of viewing the world though.
This Conservative view of the world is not about academic theory but a fundamental insight into the psychological motivation of voters. Most people do not spend their lives obsessing about politics and are sceptical about grand theories. They are prepared to put their trust in leaders who they respect and will steer the country through choppy waters in a responsible way. It is better to set a direction at elections, let politicians chart a course and we can get on with the more important things in life: love, family, career satisfaction and the million other things that are beyond the direct agency of SW1.
I do not believe this is an anachronistic or patronising viewpoint either, although some will inevitably try and claim it is. A lot of people in Britain – and the wider world today – are dissatisfied about the impacts of globalisation, want change and forcefully argue that they want politicians to get on with delivering it. But it is always the tendency of a generation to believe that we are unique. I would humbly argue that widespread dissatisfaction was also expressed in the late 1970s as we saw the economic decline inherent in unfettered state control – and the mid-1940s as the calls for state provision of public services grew unanswerable.
It is true that digital discourse makes moderation much more difficult in political debate and I have argued this before. But I have an inkling this is also about the state of the current messengers – exceptional politicians can rise above it. The referendum and how politicians responded to it has also served as a guiding prism for people’s dissatisfaction at the moment: do you get it or do you not. As I have argued already though, this is partially a consequence of Theresa May choosing to define it in fundamentally un-Conservative terms.
Indeed, I do not think people are teetering towards the column of demagogues now because they respect them or necessarily believe that their grand dogma will deliver the fruits promised. It is much more of a case that they have a deep distaste for the current generation of so called, self-defined moderate politicians: their over-claiming, their broken promises, their confusion between message discipline and message automation, their tactical body swerves, their short-termism, their expenses, their insider-ism, their obsession with polling to tell them what to believe rather than how to articulate what they believe – and their far too common disrespect for the intelligence of the electorate by avoiding difficult truths.
The relentless pace of the modern news cycle has inevitably played a role in this too. And it is incumbent on politicians to call this out where appropriate in sensible terms. Journalists only feature slightly higher than politicians in surveys on trusted professions.
But politicians must set the lead. The Conservative Party has prospered and come through deep attitudinal shifts in the past because it recognised the call for change – but then set about implementing its solutions in a mature, responsible way.
We can come through Brexit too – but only if we are prepared to hammer out strategic clarity on some fundamental, difficult points.
One – Brexit is going to happen because people voted for it. But in this hung parliament it is only going to work if we settle on an imperfect compromise for now. We should not pretend it is the campaign prospectus of Vote Leave but instead a mature way of reconciling a divided country with the practical realities of governing in prose. As Vote Leave said in their victory speeches hours after the referendum result was read out, the process must be one of gradual divergence and one that unites the country and its political traditions rather than one that divides. The next 9 months are a process of plumbing rather than painting. We have to get out of the political structures of the European Union by next March, but significant divergence is for later and will probably need to be addressed in future manifestos and elections to have broad consent. The European Union is also likely to change significantly in the next decade, greater attention is already being paid for example to the problems of uncontrolled free movement, and this will affect our relationship with it away from the heat of the currents set of negotiations.
Two – a compromise deal is probably going to come at the cost of some of the party’s current membership and vote. We have failed to lance the boil of Europe for too long and parked difficult conversations through political devices too often. I can say this more easily than my former colleagues because I do not have to talk to the membership and polling departments every day. I understand the short-term political dangers. The best way to guard against this is to encourage more people from younger, diverse backgrounds to join the Conservative Party – and to also treat our current membership with respect and decency. This lesson was not followed in previous modernisation attempts in the mid-2000s. People who disagree profoundly with the Chequers compromise are not bad people and they are not stupid. They are decent people who work hard for the party, pay their subs and are often more understanding of the practical realities of life than people who work in Westminster. The challenge is to keep as many of them in the tent as possible, while emotionally connecting with new audiences.
Three – and intimately connected to point two – we need an agenda beyond Brexit fast. Our broad tent can only hold if leaving the European Union is removed as the central pole. By this, I don’t mean platitudes and truisms about how technical education, productivity and the digital world are really important. Instead, an overarching political vision is needed that reminds the country that the challenges we faced the day before the referendum have not gone away. From the future of work to the tensions of automation, and not to forget the huge need to build digital infrastructure, the world is going to look very different in ten years’ time and Britain must be ready for it. The political prize of the next generation will go to leaders who understand this truth and can find a way of uniting enough ‘nation state backers’ and ‘global co-operators’ to come on the journey together. Conservatives should position themselves as the moderate guardians of this future that is inherently promising but carries risks of dislocation; Labour meanwhile are all about the outdated debates of the past.
Four – we need an inspiring leader who can hold this moderate vision for the future together, premised in an understanding of what has made the Conservative Party the most successful and fearsome political force in the democratic world. It is not for me to say categorically whether any of the above is in Theresa May’s grasp. All I will say is that recently she has not shown the promise she demonstrated when she launched her leadership campaign on 30 June 2016 – a platform of moderation incidentally. She should be given opportunities in the autumn to persuade the party and the country that she is capable of the task. Otherwise someone else who feels it in their bones will need to pick up the torch.
Nick Hargrave is a former Downing Street special adviser, where he worked under both David Cameron and Theresa May. He now works at Portland, the communications consultancy.
