Tom Jones is Councillor for Scotton and Lower Wensleydale and author of the Potemkin Village Idiot substack.
‘Adversity’, Albert Einstein once wrote, ‘introduces us to ourselves.’ As the Tory party is about to demonstrate, it is as true as E=MC2.
Frankly, our seismic defeat was a punctuation mark on a sentence that was already written. For a long time, we Conservatives have been unsure of our mission, uneasy with itself, and unable – or unwilling – to deliver on the promises that delivered us a landslide just five short years ago.
Reckoning with the scale of our greatest-ever election defeat will kick off a brutal process of introducing the Conservative Party to itself. This process will make it its’ own worst critic, and it is nothing more than the electorate deserve. In 2019 they put their faith in us, and we failed to deliver.
Our betrayal is no little thing and, as James Vitali points out, it stretches beyond 2019: “Over the past fourteen years, the Party has pledged to the public that it would reduce the size of the state, grip immigration, roll back identity politics, drive up productivity and secure better standards of living for everyone in our United Kingdom. It has failed on each one of these commitments.”
If we are ever to regain their trust we must analyse and explain to the electorate why our stated preference – what we said – never married up to our revealed preference – what we did. But we also owe it to them to conduct our re-introduction properly. And we are already in danger of failing.
Already we have seen infighting, as Kemi Badenoch used a Shadow Cabinet meeting to launch a scathing attack on Rishi Sunak, designed to distance herself from his leadership, and Suella Braverman, designed to discredit her rival as having “a very public nervous breakdown.”
Braverman’s pitch, meanwhile, began with a provocative speech in which she attacked the Progress Pride flag as a “monstrous thing” and the “lunatic woke virus working its way through the British state”, before blaming liberal colleagues for having “trashed” the party.
Making his early pitch, James Cleverly called for the Conservatives to unite to win back the public’s trust, writing in The Times that “There is strength in unity, and the Conservative party has always been at its best when it embraces being a broad church.”
A month after the greatest election defeat in our history, after 14 years of broken promises, this is pretty thin gruel. If this is to be the tone of the leadership contest, then our leaders seem to be in danger of mirroring the problem of the last election: being unable to articulate a compelling, uniting vision for the future.
When leaders can’t do that, they fixate on who’s to blame for what’s wrong with the present. But after 14 years in power, we were to blame for what is wrong with the present. The conservatism we offered the electorate owed more to inadequacy, inertia, and inability than ideology.
In government, the electorate found this intolerable. In opposition, they will find it irrelevant.
We do not need personal attacks. We need to examine what promises were kept, which weren’t, and why we weren’t able to keep them. We do not need alienating culture war headlines, designed to provoke rather than persuade. We must explain why, after 14 years, the country is no wealthier, notably less conservative and its’ citizens increasingly vulnerable. We do not need calls for unity, without any sense of what we are uniting around.
Sober analysis, rigorous self-assessment, and frank home truths will be a start to winning back the electorate’s trust. It will require the co-operation of the entire party – but alone, it won’t be enough. Showing we have listened and learned will go towards restoring the public’s trust, but without that uniting and compelling vision for the future, we will still be to blame for what’s wrong with the present.
Whoever leads the party next will need to provide a vision for a Conservative Britain fit for the 21st Century. As Fred de Fossard argues, “ultimately, the post-2024 Conservative Party needs to understand its purpose, the people who it can and should attract, and how it can campaign on behalf of the millions of right-of-centre voters in Britain.” We can only find out whether we are moving in the right direction if we first understand where we intend to go.
At this stage of the race, the support of a councillor means little. Or perhaps it means more. After all, unlike MPs, I’m not hoping to be promoted or afraid of being sacked. My goal is more modest. I want someone who will restore first the trust, then the support, of the electorate to the Conservatives.
There is only one person who can do that. And that is Robert Jenrick.
On confronting the hard truths, he has been nothing if not honest. His article for The Times was brutally so: “the fundamental reason we lost”, he wrote, “is because we failed to deliver what we promised for the British people.”
In that article, Jenrick – as he has done previously, and often, and correctly -identified migration as “our biggest and most damaging failure.” Despite promises, he argued, we “insulted the public with decisions that caused net migration to spiral to unprecedented levels. Even when the failure was evident and alarm bells ringing, corrective action was painfully slow.”
If migration was our biggest failure, who can be better placed to restore trust than the only immigration minister in 14 years to successfully reduce it, who resigned in protest over the watering-down of the ultimately ineffectual and now-inconsequential Rwanda Bill?
As for the future, Jenrick does not appeal to abstract values – as Conservatives without ideas so often do – but offers pragmatic policies. A balancing between our climate obligations and the safety and living standards of our citizens. Utilising liberal, sensible supply-side reforms to unlock opportunity across Britain. Spreading the core principle of conservatism – a sense of ownership of the country – across generations.
Not to mention that Jenrick is a polished performer, interested in persuading rather than provoking. To win back the public we need to show that we are serious about competence. That means project clear, not project fear.
Being Leader of the Opposition is a difficult but not thankless task. We have begun what promises to be the most radical Labour governments of all time, and if the last election has proved anything, it is that huge majorities guarantee nothing. With the right leader, honesty about our failures in the past, and an alternative to Labour’s vision of the future, we can keep Starmer to a mercifully short five-year term.
Britain needs us to succeed. Under Jenrick, we will.
