Ten years ago I had a boss who wanted to be a Lib-Dem MP. He spent his weekends campaigning in a Tory-held seat, and he showed up on Mondays tired and depressed. “This is a Tory nation,” he explained. The voters he encountered on the doorstep disliked taxes, immigrants, gays, Brussels and welfare cheats. What they liked was hanging criminals. In other words, their instincts were the instincts of the Conservatives, which explained why the party was having an 18-year run in power.
Things change. My ex-boss is now a Labour minister, while the Tories have lost three straight elections. The latest plague to befall them is that their voters are dying. Before the last election on May 5, candidate Nicholas Boles had thought he would at least win Hove for the Tories. He didn’t. Boles later realised that his sums had been wrong. One of the reasons, he says, was that “a couple of thousand local Tories had died since 2001. It’s a worrying result, and actually it’s been repeated in lots of other places”.
The party kicks off its annual conference in Blackpool on Monday leaderless, trying to work out which candidate for the job has the fewest flaws. Since 1994 the Tories have remained stuck at just over 30 per cent in opinion polls and elections. Their voters are increasingly ageing white men from the south-east. In big cities, Conservatives barely exist: it’s a remarkable fact that of Manchester’s 96 local councillors, not one is a Tory.
The greatest electioneering machine of any modern democracy may never return to government. These things happen: the Liberals last had a prime minister in 1922, and few people now remember the German Zentrumspartei or the American Whigs.
Yet it’s more likely that the present is just a blip. Malcolm Rifkind, the former Conservative cabinet minister who is now somewhat hopefully running for party leader, pointed out to me that in the 1980s people made similar predictions about Labour. Rifkind laughed: “I remember somebody saying, ‘When I refer to Jim Callaghan as the last Labour prime minister, I mean the last Labour prime minister!’”
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Rifkind is not just being brave. There is a strong argument that the Tories will be back. What sent them from dominance to subjection was just 10 per cent of British voters deserting the party after 1992, either because they died or changed their minds. In the age of the floating voter - social class determines vote much less than it did before 1983 - it is perfectly possible to win back the same proportion.
Tony Blair himself said this year that he “could sort out the Tory party in five minutes” (a ninth of the time it would supposedly take for Iraq to launch weapons of mass destruction). He cunningly refrained from giving tips. However, the so-called “stupid party” - after John Stuart Mill’s dictum, “I never meant to say that the Conservatives are generally stupid. I meant to say that stupid people are generally Conservative” - has spent the summer working out what Blair meant. All over Westminster there is the whirring sound of Tories thinking. They have been able to do so in relative quiet - most Britons having forgotten the party exists. This is a strangely thrilling time for Conservatives, with resonances of 1994 when an unwrinkled lawyer named Blair took over the Labour party.
When you ask Conservatives what they can learn from their last popular leader, Margaret Thatcher, the usual answer is: little. “We’re in a very different era now. The style then was right for then, and a new style is needed for now,” says David Cameron, another candidate for leader, in one of the few firm statements he risked making to me. It’s dawning on the party just how much Britain has changed since Thatcher was driven out of Downing Street in tears, 15 years ago. The average Briton has 50 per cent more income now than then. They are much more likely to have been to university, they don’t believe a woman’s place is in the home, they work longer hours, travel abroad on budget airlines, are as likely to be single or divorced as married, and are not obsessed with the second world war.
Partly because of this, the Tories have lost almost all their election-winning policies. More educated voters are more socially liberal: they don’t despise gays or single mothers or foreigners. Being richer, people are less desperate for tax cuts. In any case, they no longer trust the Tories to cut taxes: many remember that the last (last?) Tory prime minister, John Major, promised to do so year on year, before raising them. Nor do Britons have the old instinctive enmity to the European Union. The memory of Britain standing alone against Europe in 1940, which shaped the previous generation, is mostly forgotten now. With the euro and European constitution off the table, Brussels interests few voters. Even among Tory voters, only 7 per cent named “Europe” as their most important issue in the last election. Voters still don’t like crime, but they now believe that Labour dislikes it too. In May’s election, that left one area in which voters favoured Tory policies over Labour’s: immigration. Most voters don’t like illegal immigrants or asylum-seekers, whom they tend to conflate. Hence Tory leader Michael Howard was forever blowing his “dog-whistle”.
Yet even immigration failed the Tories. This summer Michael Ashcroft, the party’s former treasurer, published an astonishing report he had personally funded called “Smell the Coffee: A Wake Up Call for the Conservative Party”, which contained perhaps the most detailed political polling ever done in Britain. He commissioned polls of tens of thousands of voters and tracked changes in opinions over several months. These found that although people didn’t like immigration, they weren’t obsessed with it. In the last ICM poll before the election, only nine per cent of voters named it as the key issue. In any case, they didn’t believe politicians could do much about it. Those most worried about immigrants - the working classes and the poorest members of society - were also least likely to vote Tory.
Most Tories now realise that they fought the campaign on a marginal issue. Nick Herbert, Tory MP and right-hand man to David Davis, one of the favourites to become the party’s next leader, told me: “[Immigration policy] was given prominence because there wasn’t a great deal that went with it. Blair had more to say, at the election, in the round, about other things.”
The Tories lack popular and distinctive policies, but their deeper problem is that they lack popular “values”. The Coffee report found that whereas about half of voters said they shared the values of Labour and the Liberal Democrats, only 36 per cent could say the same about the Tories. According to the pollsters Populus and YouGov, most people believe the Tories are “out of touch”, “opportunistic”, “don’t care about ordinary people”, are “stuck in the past”, and “care more about the well-off than the have-nots”.
If the Tories can’t learn from Thatcher, or from that other election-winning conservative George Bush - mention of the US president prompts shaking of heads from leading Tories - then the obvious role model is Blair. “The hatred of Blair is bonkers,” says Ed Vaizey, a new Tory MP. “Because he’s not the leader of our party, we can be more dispassionate about what makes him a winner. Whereas Labour MPs feel more passionately because they feel he is wrecking their party.” Bizarrely, it’s easier to find Tory MPs praising Blair than Labour ones: “Frankly, we’re pretty well governed,” an influential Tory admitted to me.
It is a cliche that Blair “stole the Tories’ clothes”: he is a middle-Englander who is pro-war, economically competent, and tough on asylum, terror and crime. Now, however, the Tories are starting to steal his clothes. Cameron told me: “People want to see a Conservative party that is going to keep those things that have worked, and scrap those things that haven’t worked from the last eight years.”
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Stealing from Blair starts with stealing the way he sees the world. To Blair, the way Britain did things in the past is irrelevant. He has never got sentimental about the second world war, Clause 4 of Labour’s constitution, grammar schools, mines or old maids cycling through the morning mist to Holy Communion. He rarely even mentions the past. What he usually talks about is adopting best practice for the future.
Labour’s slogan for the last election - “Forward not back” - was less silly than it sounds because it differentiated the party from the Conservatives. The Tories can often seem the elected representatives of Britain’s past, a resistance movement against the Zeitgeist. Laura Sandys, chairman of www.opendemocracy.net, was on the party’s candidate list for the last election but wasn’t nominated for a seat (if there are not many women in this article, it’s because there are not many at the top of the party). She says few in her party have either a vision or an appetite for the future. “The party’s political instincts are to hark back to a mythical view of the 1950s, when everyone had a rose arch in the garden, the children came home smiling from school, and the father from his secure job at 5.30pm. There was no crime or antisocial behaviour, and everyone respected authority.”
The Coffee report backs her up: “To the extent that the voters who rejected us in 2005 associate the Conservative Party with anything at all, it is the past.” This summer Boles circulated a seven-page internal party document outlining the problem. He accused the Conservatives of being “wedded to meaningless traditions, suspicious of changes in society”. For instance, Tories identified themselves with foxhunting, with defending the remnants of the British Empire such as Gibraltar and descendants of British settlers in Zimbabwe.
Boles might also have added the Tory obsession with the second world war: the resume of Iain Duncan Smith, Howard’s predecessor as leader, opened with a mention of his father, a decorated Spitfire pilot in the war. Once the Tories set aside the war, they can finally stop fighting Europe and stop feeling that they have to support the US in unpopular wars as a tribute to the wartime alliance.
Boles also criticises “our belief that the past was better than the present, our scepticism about the promise of the future”. Populus found that two-thirds of Tory voters believed that “Britain was a better country to live in 20 or 30 years ago.” In an economic boom, with far more people than ever educated for a good career, they are probably wrong. Most Britons tell pollsters that the present is better than the past. Nostalgia, in modern parlance, is “so over”.
Hence, as Ashcroft writes, Tory voters in May were disproportionately people “aged 55 or over, who were retired or not working, who owned their home outright, and who read the Daily Mail or The Daily Telegraph”. As one defeated Tory candidate grumbled way back in 2001, every day a Tory voter dies and a Labour voter turns 18.
The Tories’ situation can be salvaged. Howard’s campaign video eulogised his sepia-tinted shopkeeper father who fled to Britain in 1939, but whoever replaces Howard as leader must instantly ban colleagues from mentioning the past. Tories must also learn informality. “Call me Tony,” Blair’s introduction at his first cabinet meeting, derided by Tories at the time, is the model.
The Tories are learning to steal. At their spring forum in Brighton in March, I attended a wince-inducing event featuring young parliamentary candidates. Their name tags gave only first names - “Rishi”, “Theresa” - and the chairman asked us to keep our mobile phones on “because we’re trialling a voting system a la Big Brother”. Inevitably, most of the audience was middle-aged or old, but there is a growing consensus that Big Brother is where the party needs to be. In the coming leadership election there will be no timewarp candidate, as Duncan Smith was in 2001. No candidate will bash gays, adulterers, working and/or single mothers (i.e. most of the electorate). “Even the bishops won’t do that,” says Nick Herbert, “so I don’t think we’re going to get British politicians standing on their soapboxes telling us how to lead our lives.” Nor will the new leader go on about Brussels much. Michael Gove, a new Tory MP, says the Dutch and French referendums that defeated the European constitution “validated Euroscepticism, and enabled Euroscepticism to continue at a lower volume”.
None of the past few Tory leaders was a wholehearted moderniser, but as the MP (and Financial Times golf columnist) Tim Yeo observes: “Everyone says we want to modernise now.” That is why the rearguard Cornerstone Conservatives - perhaps 25 MPs who believe that “faith, flag and family are at the heart of Tory thinking” - can’t find anyone to endorse.
Ancestor-worship is one Tory sin. Another is berating everything the government does: attacking the present, if you like. Last autumn, 70 per cent of voters thought “the Conservatives just attack the government over whatever happens to be in the news, but never say anything positive.” On the first day of the election campaign, after Blair had proclaimed his “driving mission for a third term”, Howard responded that voters could “reward Mr Blair for eight years of broken promises and vote for another five years of talk, or they can vote Conservative”. Undecided voters in Ashcroft’s focus groups didn’t like Blair’s rhetoric, but they liked Howard’s negativity even less.
The Tories are sorry now. Opposing everything is a boring position for intelligent people to take, and particularly silly now that both parties’ have drifted towards one another. Yeo confesses to feeling guilty that, as education spokesman, he opposed the government’s plan for university tuition fees: “It was highly opportunistic. We came closer to bringing down the government than on any other policy, but it was mistaken.”
Leading Tories have decided that from now on in opposition they will not always oppose. Howard and Davis set the new tone after the July 7 bombings in London, when Howard praised Blair’s “statesmanlike” response, and Davis made intelligent nonpartisan remarks. Two months after the election, the Tories finally looked like a potential government. Yeo says: “Opposition is about bipartisan support of the government as often as possible. Then, when we did oppose, the public would really sit up and take notice.” Yeo adds that it’s hard to claim every day that the country is “in a ghastly mess”, when it’s not in a ghastly mess.
No more past; no more opportunism; a critic might say that doesn’t leave the Tories with much. They now need a vision of Britain’s future: their own version of “forward not back”.
Amid the chaos of his desk, Boles has a flipchart showing what is required. His first chart shows the party losing votes among social classes ABC1: professionals, managers, clerks and administrators. In the 1970s the party had a nearly 40-percentage-point lead over Labour among this group. Even as late as 1992, the Tories were still the party of aspiration: Blair once said he knew that year’s election was lost when he met a man out washing his car, who said he’d always voted Labour, but would vote Tory now he had his own business. This May, Boles’s chart shows, the Tory lead over Labour among ABC1 voters was 1 percentage point. “This is our core vote,” he notes. “The Thatcher years were all about blowing away the wets and toffs while self-made people came up. Right now the Tory party represents aspiration only to someone who wants to become a blazer-wearing college-scarved Alan B’stard sort of person, and nobody normal aspires to that.”
Boles flips the page. The next chart shows the party’s support rising among C2s: the skilled working classes, taxi drivers for instance, who like Tory positions on immigrants and crime. Influential Tories are uneasy about attracting these people: as one of them told me, “Our core vote will never be people who own pit bull terriers.”
Then Boles flips the page to the punchline: a graph with a rising line crossing a falling one. It shows the number of ABC1s going up, while C2s die out. The Tories are fishing in a shrinking pool. The change in their voting base evokes Bush’s Republicans: losing the traditional elite, and winning in return poor voters in redneck states who vote Republican against their own economic interests. It’s just that in America, the “faith, flag and family” pitch works better than in Britain.
A free-marketeering, anti-regulation party such as the Tories should attract ambitious people. However, the problem with ambitious people is that they tend to be more interested in the future than in the past. “It’s appalling!”, says Rifkind, that few doctors or teachers now vote Tory. “You’ve got to win them back. And we ought to be able to, because most of their aspirations are very similar to our own.”
Aspirational voters want a vision of the future. Maurice Saatchi, the party’s co-chairman, concluded after the last election: “A certain idealism, a marching tune people can respond to is, as it once was for Disraeli, Churchill and Thatcher, the essential precondition for success.”
Herbert says: “If you were standing on the doorsteps at the last election, as I was, what was our vision of Britain? I don’t think people knew. So we’ve got to paint a picture of the country that we want to see. I think we do need to capture some of that sunny optimism of Reagan, Bush and Thatcher.” The Tories need an updated version of Reagan’s election-winning line, “It’s morning in America”, or Harold Wilson’s “white heat of technology”.
After that, they will need content. The Tories are adaptable on policy because, as their latest historian Geoffrey Wheatcroft writes: “Toryism is fundamentally unideological.” On public spending the Tories have now stolen Blair’s clothes: they think it’s a good thing. On this key issue, they will fight Labour for the political centre - promoting, in Cameron’s rather unwieldy catchphrase, “modern compassionate Conservatism”. They’ll remain mean to immigrants and criminals because that’s what the public wants, but they’ll talk about it less.
The Tories do have some ideas not stolen from Blair. They like “localism”, the notion that Whitehall must stop micromanaging every school and hospital in the land. Cameron marvelled, after a visit to Wandsworth prison: “You know, they’re facing 43 different targets they have to meet.” Most candidates also want companies to play a role in providing public services. However, as Cameron admits, it’s hard to interest voters in issues of process: “I don’t think anyone gets out of bed in the morning, and thinks, ‘I wish the state was smaller tomorrow than it is today.’”
The Tories still lack popular big ideas: they have nothing to match Thatcher’s privatisations, or council-house sales, or union-bashing. Cameron does see new terrain, traditionally ignored by politicians, which the Tories could conquer. “People want to know that your concerns cover quality of life as well as quantity of money,” he says. “They want to hear about Conservative policy towards the environment, housing, public space, as well as crime and immigration and Europe.”
Quality of life is a promising topic. Bill Clinton’s adage, “It’s the economy, stupid,” may no longer hold in a country where people are richer than ever but lack time and community. Before the last election, Howard spoke on childcare, after which Theresa May, shadow secretary for transport and the environment, commented: “The first thing for us as Conservatives is to recognise that the leader has made a speech on childcare. We do see it’s an issue.”
Yeo suggests seriously noticing the environment. This is the age of tsunamis, deadly hurricanes and overcrowding of the south-east of England. “The next four years, there won’t be a week that goes by without a discussion of climate change,” says Yeo. “It’s a naturally Conservative issue.”
And the Tories could note perhaps the most popular political event of 2005: the LIVE8 concerts to support debt relief for Africa. Voters may not want to give significant amounts of their money to poor Africans, but they do want politicians to do something.
When it comes to terror, the Tories don’t like Labour’s multiculturalism. The project now is to define a new Britishness, rather than the old maids on bikes that Major once invoked.
The one idea the Tories should be wary of mentioning too often is that of getting companies to help provide public services. This issue gets Tories very excited - Davis in particular. Rifkind, Cameron and Herbert all discussed the subject at length with me. They may even be right that private provision will make the public sector more efficient. However, it’s a dangerous idea to push because voters suspect that the Tories secretly want to scrap public services. This suspicion is reinforced by the fact that few leading Tories themselves use public services, and are always offering voters ways of escaping them, often through vouchers. According to the Ashcroft report, voters regarded health as the biggest issue of the election. They trusted Labour more on it. The Tories need to prove they care about the National Health Service before they talk about reforming it. In any case, “reforming public services” is the sort of technical language that sends voters to sleep. At times during the last campaign, zero per cent of voters polled by Ashcroft were aware of Tory promises of choice in schools and less interference in public services. Voters think public services are already improving anyway.
Once the Tories scrap the past and find a vision, all they will need is a better brand and a new leader. The Tory brand sucks. Recall Bridget Jones’s horror on discovering that Mark Darcy is a Tory: “Realise when starting a relationship with a new person there will be differences between you but had never, ever in a million years suspected I might have been sleeping with a man who voted Tory. Suddenly felt I didn’t know Mark Darcy at all, and for all I knew, all the weeks we had been going out he had been secretly collecting limited-edition miniature pottery animals wearing bonnets from the back pages of Sunday supplements, or slipping off to rugby matches on a bus and mooning at other motorists out of the back window.”
Ed Vaizey says: “It’s become a cliche among pollsters that if you put forward Conservative policies to a focus group, people cheer them on. Then, when you say they are Conservative policies, they say, ‘What’s the catch?’”
I realised just how bad the Tory brand was when I sat on London buses stealthily reading John Redwood’s rearguard book Singing the Blues, hoping nobody would see me. Yet the brand is not tarnished forever. It is three centuries old. It stands for Churchill (when he wasn’t being a Liberal) as well as for Alan B’stard, Cecil Parkinson, Neil Hamilton, Christine Hamilton, Jonathan Aitken, Jeffrey Archer, Iain Duncan Smith, William Hague, Anne Widdecombe and Michael Howard. The Tories themselves are ceasing to damage their brand, now that they have given up sleaze and have found some younger, minority and even female candidates. They don’t even quarrel much any more: in the midst of a leadership campaign, an “After you, Claude. No, after you, Cecil” courtesy prevails. The hope for them is finding their own Blair: a leader who can transform the party’s brand by embodying it.
If the Tories need a Blair, that would seem to argue against Cameron. An Old Etonian cannot seem a middle Englander. That was why the Tories scrapped the Old Etonian Douglas Hurd as a candidate for leader in 1990. A year after that, Rupert Morris, in his book Tories: From Village Hall to Westminster, provided one of the earliest descriptions of Cameron, then in his early twenties: “ ...the first recognisable Tory, young, tanned and confident, with an expensive-looking suit”. Cameron, unlike Blair, speaks posh rather than Estuary-tinged English and, strangely for a politician, rarely meets your eye. He also appears desperate to say nothing that will put anyone off. In fact, he seems to be making friends so as to run for leader next time around.
Even if Tory leadership elections are usually won by surprise candidates - Edward Heath, Thatcher, Major - Rifkind and Liam Fox won’t win this time. That leaves Davis and Ken Clarke. Clarke is 65, even older than most Tory voters, but he tends to talk about the present rather than the past. He would also return the party to the centre, where most British votes are. Indeed, given that he stood still while the rest of British politics shifted to the right in the 1980s and 1990s, he may now be to the left of Blair. In the 1997 election, Clarke was the only senior politician in either party who kept praising public spending.
This summer, however, he has scarcely bothered to canvass Tory MPs. Furthermore, the reason he tops all polls as the most popular candidate is that few Britons have heard of the other ones. When one of Ashcroft’s focus groups was shown a Tory election broadcast featuring the shadow cabinet this spring, people didn’t recognise the frontbenchers and assumed they “were in fact ‘vox pops’ of ordinary voters or party supporters”.
Davis is the Tory candidate keenest on tax cuts and public-sector reform. His supporters laud him as a self-made man, raised in a council flat, who took the name Davis from his stepfather. This would mean that after Thatcher (nee Roberts), Major (born Major-Ball), Iain Duncan Smith (born Ian) and Michael Howard (born Hecht), Davis would be the fifth of the past six Tory leaders to have changed their name, suggesting that mobility is part of the job description. Davis does seem a middle Englander, has become a better speaker, was in the SAS and has been a minister, but people will only vote for him if they feel he believes in public services. His other problem is that he has made enemies among Tory MPs. In 2003 they united behind Howard partly to stymie him. Davis should make the final runoff but by that point, if either Clarke or Cameron has been eliminated, their votes will go to the surviving anti-Davis centrist candidate.
By then, whenever it is, the leadership campaign will have lasted several months. “If it were an orgasm it would be fantastic,” says Yeo. “As it’s a leadership contest, it’s not necessarily so great.”
And then comes the next general election. At last the Tories won’t be running on a nostalgia platform, won’t be running against Blair, and may not be running against Gordon Brown’s self-proclaimed “longest period of economic growth in 200 years”. One interpretation of recent British political history is that Blair and Thatcher are unbeatable political giants. Running against them is like playing tennis against Roger Federer. Each of them won three straight general elections, the first prime ministers to have done so since the 1820s. Facing Brown could be easier. Admittedly he is currently more popular than Blair, but voters know him as a technocrat rather than as a politician. When he is leader, less appealing sides of his persona may be exposed. Better yet for the Tories, voters place Brown well to the left of the British centre, whereas they place Blair virtually dead-centre.
By 2009 Labour may have ceased to be all things to all men. Economic growth allowed Labour to raise public spending without increasing taxes much. Blair was never forced to choose. If there is a recession - and consumer spending has already fallen - Brown will have to choose. That will alienate either the centre-right or the centre-left or both. Reputations for economic competence are fragile: the Tories lost theirs on one day, September 16 1992, when the pound was ejected from the European exchange-rate mechanism. If Labour struggles and the Tories are near enough to the centre and don’t look absurd, they could benefit. Otherwise, the day after the 1997 election, when a defeated Major turned up at the Oval to watch the cricket, could become oddly historical.
Simon Kuper is an FT contributor and author.
