One day last December, at 3 a.m., a 78-year-old British Conservative Party volunteer was reportedly awakened by a call from Mark Menzies, the Conservative lawmaker for whom she worked. He said he was being held somewhere by “bad people» who demanded £5,000, or $6,300, to free him. The volunteer, a former campaign manager for Mr Menzies, paid the sum with her own savings. It was then reimbursed from party funds.
Mr Menzies, who was suspended from the party last month, denies this and other allegations, which include using £14,000 party funds for personal medical bills. The ins and outs of his irregularities are neither here nor there, although he is not a stranger to scandal. However, this affair embodies a Conservative Party in crisis. The Conservatives have been up to some very strange antics, and one could argue that the party itself has been held captive by the wrong people. After 14 turbulent years in power, he finally seems to have his reward.
For Prime Minister Rishi Sunak and his government, defeat seems inevitable. Last Thursday’s local elections went almost evenly catastrophic for his party: across England and Wales, the Conservatives lost 474 council seats and were defeated in all but one local council election. The results confirmed polls which for several months had given the opposition Labor Party a lead of 10 to 20 points, suggesting something of a wipeout in the general election due to take place by January next year.
Before the election there were the usual murmurings in Tory ranks about Mr Sunak’s removal. But the rebels backed down, perhaps feeling a rare sense of ridicule. Lord Salisbury, Stanley Baldwin, Winston Churchill and Margaret Thatcher led the Conservative Party for more or less 15 years. By comparison, we have already had five Conservative leaders – and prime ministers – in the last eight years. One more election, a few months before the elections, would only confirm the idea that this historic party is now, like some of its legislators, lamentable, sinister and ridiculous.
There has been a so-called Conservative Party for 350 years, although there is very little in common between the Royalist Cavaliers of King Charles II’s reign and the motley crew of King Charles III’s reign. Renamed the Conservatives by Sir Robert Peel in the 1830s, the party has often suffered internal ruptures and suffered three disastrous electoral defeats in the last century, to the Liberals in 1906 and Labor in 1945 and 1997.
But the conservatives have always managed to recover and regain power. The Conservative Party is not only the oldest political party in European history, but also the most successful. Alone or in coalition, the Conservatives have held power for 98 of the last 150 years, constantly adapting to new circumstances and confounding so many hopes and fears that 20th century Britain would belong to the left. They have won a majority of votes in the last four general elections, culminating in 2019, when they won the largest parliamentary majority in 30 years.
Today they are in complete disarray, as symbolized by their increasingly disreputable staff. A legislator was detained for sexually assaulting a minor; another left because a fellow lawmaker noticed he was watch pornography on his mobile phone while sitting in the House of Commons. It’s almost refreshing to see a case of old-fashioned corruption: Scott Benton, who represented Blackpool South, has been found offering its services to Parliament to get money and had to resign. The Conservatives lost the race to replace him last week.
Meanwhile, like a drumbeat in the background, we hear “Brexit” and “Boris”, the two key terms in the party’s recent implosion. For much of the last 70 years, the Conservatives have been the Europhile party. In 1963, a Conservative prime minister, Harold Macmillan, attempted unsuccessfully to join the European Economic Community; 10 years later, another, Edward Heath, managed to join us; and in 1986, Mrs Thatcher helped pass the Single European Act, a crucial step towards European integration.
Gradually, from the 1990s onwards, the Conservatives welcomed into their ranks increasingly fanatical so-called Eurosceptics – “Europhobes” would be a better word – while they were harassed from the right by smaller parties anti-Europeans, the Referendum Party, the party for the independence of the United Kingdom. Party, the Brexit Party and now Reform UK These parties have never had a candidate elected to Parliament, but they have often won a large share of the Conservative vote.
To appease these fanatics, these “bad people” who are still in the minority but have acquired control over the party, David Cameron promised a referendum on membership of the European Union. He could have said that referendums are “the work of dictators and demagogues” – those were Mrs Thatcher’s words – but instead he called a vote he hoped to win, but then lost.
The defeat occurred in particular thanks to the intervention of Boris Johnson. No one could believe that his support for Brexit was the result of a sincere conviction, which would have been almost an oxymoronic: everyone knows that he has never seriously believed in anything in his life, except personal progress and personal satisfaction. He only supported Leave when he realized it was the only way into the party leadership.
Mr Johnson achieved that ambition and became prime minister in 2019, serving for three years until his colleagues, fed up with his misconduct, forced him out. Brexit is its legacy, and yet the golden future it was supposed to bring has never dawned. Last week, the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development predicted that the British economy would be in the least efficient of the Group of 7 countries next year. Unsurprisingly, the British are now suffering from Bregret, with polls revealing that consistent majorities regrets having left the European Union.
Beyond everyday politics and policies, the Conservatives increasingly look like a dying party, which indeed they are in statistical terms. By the early 1950s, the party had 2.8 million members and was one of the great popular movements in Europe. In some constituencies, the local Conservative association had more than 10,000 members, and the Young Conservatives were a thriving group, only partly due to its extrapolitical function as a kind of dating app.
In the 1980s, the number of party members was still 1.3 million. But two years ago, when the party’s leader was last elected by members, only 140,000 votes were cast. MPs are much more southern, affluent, middle-class and right-wing than most Tory voters, let alone the electorate as a whole – and simply much older. Polls reveal that surprisingly few people under 30 intend to vote Conservative in the next election.
As far-right nativist parties rise across Europe, respectable traditional conservatism is more important than ever. And yet there are prominent conservatives, like Suella Bravermansaid briefly, if brusquely, the interior minister, who said the party should move even further to the right.
This is a recipe for disaster and an abandonment of the historic character of the party. Conservatism has many vices, but it – and notably English Toryism – has certain redeeming virtues: skepticism, pragmatism, pessimism and an element of common sense. If these virtues have now deserted the conservatives, they deserve to pay the price.
Geoffrey Wheatcroft is a British journalist and the author, most recently, of the upcoming “Bloody Panico!” Or, what happened to the Conservative Party? ”, from which this essay is adapted.
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