Andrew Griffith is the Member of Parliament for Arundel & South Downs and Shadow Secretary of State for Science and Technology.
Fundamental to the process of renewing the Conservative Party is being honest about our mistakes and learning from them. No government gets everything right.
In my business career before Parliament, I was at Sky for two decades during which we grew our sales and customers every single year, becoming one of the UK’s most successful ever consumer companies. We did that by building high-performing teams, and a consistent theme was the non-adjectival giving and receiving of honest feedback.
Although eclipsed by the current leadership contest, I hope that ConservativeHome and next month’s Conservative Party Conference will both be forums to debate openly what we got right and what we must learn from the last few years in government.
It’s arguably much more important than the individual chosen to lead us, as she or he will only be able to chart a course to victory based on firm foundations which most MPs and members unite around. In opposition, it is not disloyal to have a lively debate around policies if we can leave the personal attacks to one side.
One example where there are lessons to be learned was the attempt to introduce a generational ban on smoking alongside the thoroughly sensible modernisation of legislation to protect minors from vaping.
Its advocates were clearly sincere about what they saw as its virtues of a ban (although those arguments did not ultimately persuade even its Kiwi architects to pursue it) but it was dissonant with the core Conservative belief of the state as servant not master.
Given that many liberty-minded Conservatives such as myself (and, I note, two of the current leadership contenders) were always going to be in a different lobby in a free vote, there was no clear political ‘win’ to be had here. As in other domains, such as perceived attacks on non-doms, private landlords, and second home-owners, we wrongly permitted ourselves to become front-runners for fuller throated attacks by socialists later.
With Reform and Greens standing in nearly all English constituencies, most Conservative parliamentary candidates at the general election were one of six political parties fighting for airtime. In a crowded marketplace, simplicity and consistency of message are vital.
Yet the manifesto commitment to a smoking ban denied us one of the last distinguishable arguments we could have used to turn out our core vote.
A decent KPI for our future policy platform emerging from the long process of renewal will be how distinctly our policies are perceived by the electorate – a kind of Rorschach test for clear-blue-water between Conservative and Labour positions.
Fortunately, Labour is making our task easier by the day. News of plans to extend the ban which already protects citizens from passive smoking indoors into an outright attack on the liberty to smoke alone in a country pub garden goes deep into authoritarian territory which I imagine few Conservative MPs support.
Most in the Parliamentary party now represent rural constituencies where village pubs have been clinging on against the odds for years. Even the threat of a ban coming may lead freeholders to sell and pub landlords to hand back their tenancies on the back of a few difficult years, legislation on workers’ rights and fears of what new horrors may yet emerge from the forthcoming budget.
If the socialists carry on at this rate – and we find the way to have an honest and open debate ourselves – who knows how quickly we might find the way back? In just weeks Labour’s approval ratings have seen the fastest ever recorded collapse of a new government of a different party. Long may this continue.
