For the moment, I stay. No reason you should care, but here’s the story of the Conservative Party and me. I joined the Tories 50 years ago this September. Not CUCA (Cambridge University Conservative Association) which was all public-school boys, soft focus, sharp elbows and dry sherry. Arriving from Africa I found the British class system weird and repellent, and still do; so I joined something called PEST (Pressure for Economic and Social Toryism), a sort of centre-left Conservative ginger group led by a chap in a white polo-neck sweater.
He came and went. Tory leaders and prime ministers came and went. I was impressed by some, depressed by others. In and out of government the party swung somewhat left, somewhat right, then somewhat left again; and from the sidelines I variously cheered, ground my teeth or just hung on.
And now? I’m grinding my teeth and hanging on. I do so out of a bit of cowardice, a bit of scepticism and a bit of hope. Cowardice because I honestly don’t think I’d be joining the Tories today if I were 19. Hope because there is a good case for a young person to join and all is not lost if enough sane men and women stay and fight. Scepticism because it remains to be seen whether The Independent Group (TIG) of despairing former Labour and former Tory MPs constitutes more than a howl of pain and protest. I’m not sure that once antisemitism is routed from Labour and Brexit settled one way or the other, the political instincts of TIG MPs will add up to a party. Or should.
Why the “or should”? Because the case has yet to be made that what we want from a realignment of British politics is one sane party in the middle flanked by two mad ones of left and right. The Tory breakaways have been quoting with approval Sir John Major’s speech in Glasgow on Tuesday, in which he attacked the rise of extremism in both main parties, and ripped into the prime minister’s kidnap by the Brexit hardline European Research Group. He’s right, but he also said this: “When I refer to ‘the Centre’, I don’t mean some amorphous new party of ‘moderates’ and ‘centrists’ [for even if it formed a government] … what would unfold when it fell out of favour? … Our electorate needs a choice between parties that are demonstrably rational, realistic — and sane.” So though I admire beyond measure what the 11 (as I write) have done, I still can’t guess where the logs are going next.
In her outstanding interview with my Times colleague Matt Chorley (if you haven’t heard the Red Box podcast already, you really must) Anna Soubry berates moderate colleagues who do as I am doing – praise her, urge her on, then shrink back, reluctant to follow.
So we do — but maybe because we have not yet despaired. Or not quite. In the Labour Party the biggest problem, though almost intractable, is simpler, and even some of Jeremy Corbyn’s left-wing colleagues know it. Their leader is a politician of low intellectual calibre which, alloyed with rigid and obstinately held ideological beliefs, renders him stupefied, or stupid, or both.
As to the Conservative Party, I am beginning to change my view of the big problem. I’ve always said it was the referendum result; and joked that although Theresa May obviously isn’t any good, the Archangel Gabriel could not have salvaged much improvement on the awful deal she’s hawking to her scared and exhausted Tory troops.
But as the months have ground on I’ve been at first shocked but finally persuaded that not Brexit alone, but also she personally, is the problem.
Time and again I’ve protested that she may not be the answer but she didn’t create this mess: she’s just an unimaginative, unremarkable, perhaps wooden but dogged politician, overly cautious and rather shy. Time and again my informants — MPs, former MPs, civil servants, special advisers — tell me, eyes flashing, that I’ve got it wrong and the public have it wrong, and she’s so much worse than that. She’s not normal. She’s extraordinary. Extraordinarily uncommunicative; extraordinarily rude in the way she blanks people, ideas and arguments. To my surprise there is no difference between the pictures of her that Remainers and Brexiteers paint.
Theresa May, they tell me (in a couple of cases actually shouting) is the Death Star of modern British politics. She’s the theory of anti-matter, made flesh. She’s a political black hole because nothing, not even light, can escape. Ideas, beliefs, suggestions, objections, inquiries, proposals, projects, loyalties, affections, trust, whole careers, real men and women, are sucked into the awful void that is Downing Street — and nothing ever comes out: no answers, only a blank so blank that it screams. Reputations (they lament) are staked on her, and lost. Warnings are delivered to her, and ignored. Plans are run by her, unacknowledged. Messages are sent to her, unanswered. She has become the unperson of Downing Street: the living embodiment of the closed door.
And I am, finally, persuaded. Persuaded that Theresa May has not simply failed to unite two wings of my party, but that her premiership has driven them apart, into anger and despair; helped to turn a disagreement into a schism. Before healing becomes possible (one told me) she, and all who wait upon her and have surrounded her, must be hounded out of the party’s cockpit, and every trace of the era of her leadership expunged. Another, careless of the proprieties, told me the political massacre should be on a Rwandan scale. For the first time I understood the passion, if not the logic, behind the self-defeating challenge to her leadership the Brexiteers mounted last December.
I do not exaggerate the violence of the imagery into which her Tory critics fly at the very mention of her name. And perhaps because I’ve been so reluctant to believe this picture, you will now believe my report.
We may have six months left to save the party, not least from its present leader. It is still — just — possible the Tories could become again a party where cards like Jacob Rees-Mogg and cads like Boris Johnson could stay but to which brave Anna Soubry, Heidi Allen and Sarah Wollaston could return. If these three and more can frighten Conservatism into re-imagining the party as it was when I joined in 1969, then I wish the expeditionaries all luck — and a safe return. If not, millions like me will be joining them.
