Is the Tory party lost in space?

My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;

Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!

Nothing beside remains. Round the decay

Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare

The lone and level sands stretch far away.

                                                   Percy Bysshe Shelley

Nothing lasts forever. Civilisations come and go. Some, like the Roman Empire, disintegrate slowly, predictably. Others, such as Polynesia’s Easter islanders, seemingly disappear in the blink of an eye, leaving barely a trace, like Shelley’s “trunkless legs of stone”.

Have Britain’s One-Nation Tories joined this roll-call of fallen power? Might the once-mighty Tory party itself follow? And, if so, what comes after?

One of the mysteries of the last six years is the whereabouts of the ur-Tory, otherwise known as the original Tory, the Tory who embodies those quintessential Tory characteristics that have kept them in power for longer than virtually any other political party in the world.

I have a friend who fits the bill: utterly loyal to the brand, Shire-based, patrician, not especially ideological, socially liberal, open-minded, mindful of people less fortunate, instinctively small state, low-tax, as English as a pair of plus fours, quietly patriotic but mystified by the logic of Brexit, deeply attached to tradition and the land, with a strong international outlook.

The term One-Nation Tory is, actually, a bit of an oxymoron. Tories are not redistributionists. They don’t want a nation of equals. That’s not what One Nation means. Inequality is, for them, part of the natural order of things. Intervention is only warranted when social tensions become a political liability. The world is still divided between strivers an scroungers.

Their hold on power, wealth and land results from a hierarchy of priorities, finely-tuned over centuries, with theirs at the top. They see themselves, as a ruling class as much as a ruling party. One nation on their terms.

Until, that is, Nigel Farage, Brexit and Boris Johnson came along swinging a wrecking ball through the political landscape. The current crop of ruling Tories, incubated in the aftermath of Brexit and the maelstrom unleashed by Johnson’s manic narcissism, are cut from a different cloth: the difference to use an (outdated) sporting analogy between gentlemen and players, between Queensbury rules and cage fights.

Much as they pretend to belong to the same tradition, the likes of Damian Green, Chair of the parliamentary One Nation Caucus, and, say, Suella Braverman, are poles apart in temperament, political instincts, and a willingness to get what they want regardless of rules or conventions.

If Green is a “compassionate conservative” or a moderate — what Margaret Thatcher called a “wet” — then Braverman and her cohort are tinder box dry. Their differences are not just political. They are cultural, even innate.

These differences go beyond the festering divisions over Europe which have strained the Conservative Party to breaking point time and again. They also go beyond manners or social graces. There’s a truculent swagger about the new breed which jars with many traditional Tories and looks “off” on the world stage.

One example is their differing approaches to Rishi Sunak’s Rwanda policy. Green and his 80/100-strong One Nation group see the policy as fundamentally ill-judged: it breaches international laws, it’s inhuman and it’s a colossal waste of money, says Green, with virtually no political return.

Shipping a few hundred refugees off to a dodgy African country which the Supreme Court (and many others) have declared unsafe at a cost of nearly £300 million, when millions struggle to stay afloat, leaves a bad taste in the mouth.

Fighting the next general election, he recently told the New Statesman, on small boats or so-called culture wars won’t work. “Anyone saying we’re going to have a single-issue election is doomed to failure. A ‘Get Rwanda done’ election is a fantasy.”

A significant difference between the two camps is how you govern. The inference in Johnson’s signature slogan “Get Brexit Done” was leaving the EU by hook or by crook – which he did with spectacular success. Johnson has gone but the swagger remains.

The polls look bad for the Tories. Really bad. What is worse, however, is the suggestion that, faced with a mind-numbing defeat, the party is going in the wrong direction. A detailed analysis by the FT’s Poll of Polls strongly suggests that looking to the Right is, to put it mildly, an inefficient way to campaign. Detailed analysis points to the fact that, while taking votes from Reform (by moving right) might shore up some seats in peril, taking votes from Labour (by pivoting back to the centre) would be more rewarding. But you’d have to walk over an awful lot of Tory bodies to do that.

The Tory party now feels like a spacecraft lost in space with no obvious way of getting home. Sitting MPs are jumping ship by the dozen. Rishi Sunak appears weightless. He hardly matters. There is no thrust and no direction. Most serious of all there is no hope.

So what happens next?

If Keir Starmer and Labour win the next general election by a huge margin, as seems possible, one of three things could happen to a defeated Tory party. Much depends on the fate of the Red Wall and how well Reform Now performs.

Number one: the Conservatives, under a new right-wing leader, reinvents itself as a full-throated, populist party: anti-immigration, anti-woke, strong on crime, nationalism and public services — Reform-lite or perhaps even with Reform. But there’s little evidence that most voters are moved by ideology. Jobs, housing, health, education, trains that run on time is what’s on their shopping list.

Number two: those One-Nation Tories still standing recapture the keep and install one of their number in charge, appealing to moderate Tories with deep pockets to help them relaunch. Broken by Brexit, One-Nation Tories keep talking about a resurrection. But where are they?

Number three (and there may well be more): the Conservative party as we know it – or at any rate — as we knew it before Cameron, May, Johnson, Truss and Sunak drove it off the rails, implodes. And, in time, just sinks into the sand, like Ozymandias’ statue, and a new right-wing party emerges.

Revivalist or charismatic Tories hold Margaret Thatcher up as the prophet whose example must be followed if the party is to regain its standing with voters. This feels like ancestor worship, an old religion. Voters cast their votes with an eye to the future, not the past.

It is not obvious that Green and his moderate Tories understand the existential threat their party faces. There’s a sense that, given time, things will work out, that the party and its membership will come to their senses perhaps in the face of a successful, centre-left Labour government.

There is a broader lesson from all this disorder. Politics is becoming more strident. Britain is becoming more diverse. The fragmentation of the Right and the banishment of moderate Tories (in some cases literally) is driving the party into ever more extreme positions. Sunak, a man of no fixed political abode, is their hostage.

It’s always possible that the party will re-establish its equilibrium. It is, if nothing else, supremely adaptable. But it’s being tested to breaking point — again.

In the US, Donald Trump has captured the Republican Party and threatens to turn it into his personal score-settling machine if he wins in November’s presidentials. Moderate Republicans, like One-Nation Tories, have nowhere else to go.

In the long run the answer lies not in the party but in the electoral system. Democracy is best served by plurality.

It’s time to rethink First Past the Post.

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