Under Boris, the Tories are becoming as ideological as Corbyn’s Labour Party
Jack Taylor/Getty Images
I once remember Jeremy Corbyn shouting during Prime Minister’s Questions that the Conservative Party was tearing itself apart. Oh, how we laughed. This was not long after Corbyn had been challenged by his own party with a vote of no confidence, one that he easily won with the help of many “true believers”. They believed in Corbyn’s vision of a socialist Britain, and shrugged that the Labour MPs who challenged him were simply Red Tories.
Nobody is laughing now. In the last week, the Conservative Party lost 21 MPs after the whip was removed from all those who voted for a Bill which would protect the UK’s economy from the horrors of a no deal Brexit. In the same fortnight, they lost Phillip Lee to the Lib Dems, while Ruth Davidson and Jo Johnson resigned.
However, many Conservative MPs and the majority of members are not criticising Boris Johnson. Many are supportive of his actions. One prospective parliamentary candidate said to me that the rebels “had been warned” what would happen should they vote against the Government. Even once liberal members, who would have abhorred the removal of MPs such as Kenneth Clarke only a few months ago, are silent, more angry at Corbyn and the other Opposition parties’ refusal to give the Conservatives a general election. The liberal Tory Reform Group, of which I was once a member, still pursues the belief that Johnson’s Cabinet is a one-nation, liberal grouping.
It’s not. When I quit the Conservatives in January this year, I was contacted by three MPs: Nick Boles, Phillip Lee and Steve Brine (who was the MP for Winchester, the association of which I was a member). While it was clear to me from the tone of the messages that it was only a matter of time before both Nick and Phillip left the party, Steve challenged me on my view that the party was becoming ideologically narrow-minded. It is sad to see him now be stripped of the whip for doing the most Conservative thing imaginable; voting in favour of protecting the economy. I wonder if he still believes the party leadership isn’t too ideological.
Those members and MPs who reject the Brexit dogma are leaving. As far as the party is concerned you either believe or you’re out. There are parliamentary assistants who are feeling the strain of the party’s transformation, inundated as they are with endless emails from Tory Brexiteers demanding that the UK leave now with no deal, as they claim Johnson has promised.
The question is, why have remaining members embraced the true believer dogma? The answer is simple: the dual threat of Jeremy Corbyn and Nigel Farage. These two populist leaders represent the greatest threat to the party’s ability to ever hold a majority again. The pain of the 2017 election is still felt by many candidates who lost to huge majorities as a result of Corbyn. I campaigned in Ealing and Acton in 2015, when the Tories lost the seat to Labour by 274 votes. In 2017, Labour retained the seat with a majority of nearly 14,000: the Conservative vote fell, but the main reason was that thousands of new voters had come out for Corbyn.
Farage, meanwhile, represents the popular attraction that each Conservative Brexiteer desperately wants to have. With him at the helm of a pure Brexit Party, many Conservatives would consider voting for it simply to get Brexit over the line. One prominent MP, despised by many Brexit voters as a “Tory Remoaner”, told me he voted for Boris “because of the threat to the UK from Nigel Farage”.
Boris won support of the members and MPs because they believed that he alone could get them Brexit, win a majority in Parliament, and defeat both Corbyn and Farage. But because the party only wants true Brexit believers as MPs and members, it has now no majority, and is subject to the whims of the Opposition parties. And yet, many in the party membership celebrate Boris for expelling the heretics who dared to challenge him.
The only thing Johnson has managed to do is to coalesce the Opposition against him, to the point where people who would never have considered Corbyn as Prime Minister now wonder who is the worst option. After ejecting so many of his own MPs, Johnson is looking like the more dogmatic and extreme of the two.
