From Our Archive: Post Brexit and Post-Covid. Reflections on the Contemporary Conservative Party

SUMMARY

• Brexit and the Covid pandemic created a new agenda of issues facing the Conservative Party, as well as shifting voter alignments.
• Taken together, these developments constitute formidable challenges to the Conservatives and their ability to manage the politics of power.
• The Party will need to communicate a refined political narrative to a diverse set of supporters, by strengthening its arguments, ideology and language.

Andrew Gamble raises important questions about the implication of the new politics for the future of the Conservative Party. Here I want to revisit aspects of his writing and to highlight some of the paradoxes and contradictions in the party’s current position under Boris Johnson's leadership.

Gamble's two classic works on British conservatism, The Conservative Nation (1974) and The Free Economy and the Strong State: the Politics of Thatcherism (1988) offer an interpretation of the different ways the Party made adaptations to its leadership and leadership style, to its policies and programmes, and to its electoral appeal, in the all-important effort to maintain power.

The 2019 election in which Johnson won the first sizeable Conservative majority since 1987 seems to suggest that the Conservative Party has re-established itself in a position of dominance. Two key factors, I suggest, are reshaping the political landscape in which the Conservatives must compete for power: Brexit and the Covid pandemic. First, however, I want to revisit briefly Gamble's earlier works to understand the Conservative Party's ability to adapt to changing circumstances.

The Conservative Nation

It is not surprising that the Conservative Party should have changed over the past fifty years. After all, the pragmatic ability to adjust to changing circumstances has frequently been seen as its secret weapon. Gamble writes that since the politics of power “has always come first for Conservatives, the politics of support is generally interpreted in terms of its requirements. “This he argues accounts for many well attested features of the party, especially the emphasis on strong leadership, the rare emergence of factions and the lack of a coherent doctrine and philosophy. Yet, each of these three features has been contested in recent scholarship and in practice.

Part of the explanation for the weaknesses of successive leaders after Thatcher has been the changes in the character of the Party in terms of its ideology and the emergence of organised factions, many of them built around the issue of Europe, which became from the Thatcher period onwards a major source of ideological discord. The task of leadership appears to have become increasingly more difficult.

The free economy and the strong state

Ideology is itself a problematic theme for the Conservative Party. It has frequently been argued that Conservatives are naturally sceptical about ideology and care more about practical politics. However, a successful political party needs to have common values and a persuasive narrative.

With Margaret Thatcher, ideological argument became a major weapon. Her concern was the conviction that she alone had the necessary vision to provide a roadmap for the Party. Gamble comments on how, out of the normal run of Conservative leaders she was: “Her lack of political and intellectual sophistication invited ridicule. The Conservative political class had long despised conviction politics and those who practised it.”. Thatcher destroyed the underpinnings of the post-war political consensus.

Thatcherism, although in many ways successful, increasingly came to be seen as toxic for the Conservative Party brand. The successors in the leadership after 1990 were left to try to deal with that negative branding as the ‘nasty party’.

The second legacy of Thatcherism was a reinforcement of the Party's association with the southern and English parts on the United Kingdom. Obviously, the 2019 election and the Conservative smashing of the so-called ‘red wall’ puts an important question mark over the policies required to maintain support from these newer constituencies.

Thirdly, Mrs Thatcher herself increasingly expressed doubts about the EU. Finally, Thatcher's politics left behind a somewhat different state, as well as a dangerous neglect of currents of social change. The result was a political shift towards Blair's repositioned and modernised Labour Party.

The leaders after Major (William Hague, Iain Duncan Smith and Michael Howard), who were all from the centre right of the party, struggled to reassert an electorally popular identity. Not until David Cameron's election as leader in 2005 did the party embark on a sustained effort to modernise its appeal, its policies and its image. Although David Cameron's reputation has suffered as a result both of his decision to hold the Brexit referendum and more recently as a result of his engagement in lobbying activities, he did help set in train a repositioning of the Party in policy and image.

The Johnson dilemma

The 2019 Johnson electoral victory was based on the Conservative ability to appeal to a new coalition of electoral support, superior organisation and money, some tactical support on the right and the advantage of facing an unpopular Labour leader in Jeremy Corbyn. Keeping to the script of ‘Get Brexit done’ worked.

In terms of the politics of support, however, the future direction of the Conservative Party is anything but clear. The role of Leave-voting constituencies in the North and Midlands—the red wall—in that victory has made it essential to find ways of ‘rewarding’ that support. The promise of ‘levelling up’ is one thing, but delivering it is likely to prove difficult and costly.

Some of these difficulties have already emerged in the handling of housing and planning, where the interests of new Conservative-supporting groups are in liberalising planning laws and having more houses built for purchase at an affordable price—objectives which are likely to run counter to those of established Conservative voters in southern seats.

The impact of Covid

It is, however, the Covid pandemic which seems likely to have the most immediate impact on the Conservative Party's agenda and identity. The Institute for Government described the pandemic as the biggest shock to the economy for 300 years. The Conservative Party has presented itself as a government willing to use an extraordinary degree of state intervention to get the country through the crisis, but it also needs to inject an increasing amount of money into the NHS and into the education sector as well as attempting to tackle social care.

Combined with a levelling-up agenda, this amalgam is not an agenda in the Thatcherite mould. Nor is it easy to see how it can be paid for without major tax increases.

There is a question mark over the leadership's ability to maintain unified support. The rise in dissenting behaviour and factionalism in Parliament over the last fifty years has been well documented, and has the potential to be disruptive of party unity and the leadership's authority.

A uniquely challenging set of constraints—both national and international—face the Conservative Party. Its capacity to manage the politics of support is vulnerable to the conflicting priorities of its voters and of factions within the parliamentary Party. The politics of power is likely to be even harder to manage, because of the uniquely challenging character of the issues facing the government. The pandemic will cast a long shadow over the economy and the provision of key public services.

Concluding questions

Is there a new ideological synthesis in the contemporary Conservative Party and, if so, how is this new approach to be described?

Scotland and Northern Ireland seem likely to require very careful management if the Party wishes to avoid presiding over the disintegration of the UK At the heart of Conservative philosophy under Thatcher was the idea of a liberalised economy and a state strengthened by the shedding of unnecessary intervention in the economy. The response to Covid and its aftermath looks much more like the strong state intervention associated with wartime and with one nation conservatism. Together with the political imperative of responding to the levelling-up agenda, the greater concern with social cohesion frames a new politics quite different from that of even a decade ago.

It is not clear how far the post-Brexit and post-Covid Conservative Party has developed the necessary arguments and language to enable it to shape future political debates, let alone dominate the terms of political discourse. By comparison with the period of the Thatcher governments, for example, this period of Conservative dominance has not seen an extensive resurgence of intellectual activity or ideological repositioning,

What we can say with some certainty is that any continued Conservative dominance is likely to be very different from that of previous ones and will demand extensive leadership qualities and strategic skills, as well as the ability to communicate a refined political narrative to a diverse set of supporters.

Digested read created by Anya Pearson with support from the author. The full-length article was originally published in The Political Quarterly Volume 92, Issue 3, July–September 2021.