Ben Houchen is the Mayor of the Tees Valley and host of the Blueprint podcast.
As you would expect, the media has been full of hot takes from the recent US election, which saw Donald Trump sweep to victory. It would be naïve to suggest that there aren’t some critical lessons the Conservative Party must take from what has happened across the Atlantic.
Now, many commentators would make the obvious leap that we must move to the right and find an insurgent populist figure to take command of our party. But that is not what the US election tells us.
As we look to renew our offer as a party to the country, we should not try to emulate Trump; he is a one-off, an enigma who is authentic to himself, for good or for ill. Just as here in the UK, Boris Johnson was a unique character, who we have found cannot be copied and pasted for electoral success.
The left often falsely compares the two men simply because they don’t like them. If you choose to analyse their politics, the similarities stop at their unusual hair! Their policy positions are at opposite ends of the conservative spectrum: Johnson is a big-state, socially liberal Tory, and Trump is a hard-nosed social conservative with a protectionist outlook on the economy.
But they are both winners.
What can be compared is their ability to reach the left-behind areas of the countries they represent. They are both of the elite, but railed against it in office, and importantly took millions of people on this journey with them.
It did not matter to people in Redcar that Johnson was an Old Etonian, or to citizens of Oklahoma that the president-elect is a billionaire, because they made it their entire mission in Government to speak to them directly and deliver the things they were asking for. They listened to those who felt they were being ignored by the establishment and those people felt heard.
We can’t pretend as a party we will find another Johnson. We won’t. But what we can do is take forward and develop the levelling up agenda that allowed millions of people to vote Conservative for the first time. This message resonated with people and offered them a better tomorrow.
It told them they mattered and shockingly it was immensely popular and has played a huge role in my own electoral success in Teesside, a huge beneficiary of Johnson’s vision which was based on the simple truth that talent is spread equally throughout the country, yet opportunity is not.
And this chimes with what I believe is the single most important lesson we must learn from what we saw across the pond. People voted with their wallets. They voted with their families’ interests in their hearts. They voted for economic independence and security.
Most people don’t read columns like this. They don’t care what was said on the floor of the House of Commons, or what the morning gossip is in Politico. Most people want to get on with their lives, with the knowledge that they can provide for their families, enjoy a few luxuries, with the realistic hope that they can continue to become better off in the future.
It is that simple, people just want to be able to get on.
Over the past few months, the Conservative Party has done a hell of a lot of talking but little has demonstrated to me that we truly understand this message and that we are at the very least moving towards an offer that has economic security and people at the heart of it.
The Government is too big. It has a view on everything, offering solutions it has little ability to deliver. A Conservative government must go back to basics, undistracted by the noise of pressure groups and protests. It must speak to the country again, and it must come up with a plan to make people richer and more optimistic about their future. That is the top and the bottom of things.
The traditional party ties have gone. Politics in today’s world is far more transactional and most people would not consider themselves on the left or right. They vote for the competent delivery of a plan based on aspiration and economic success, and it is this that should inform our position as a party. Not the ideological debates of the past, but a serious plan to improve people’s everyday lives and to help people be heard.
