Christopher Howarth works for the European Research Group is former Parliamentary candidate, special adviser and author of a forthcoming political thriller The Durian Pact, based on his time in politics.
The Grecian valley at Stowe House is dominated by the Temple of Concord. A peaceful place, originally built by Lord Cobham to symbolise the Greece he believed was “the Birthplace of Liberty”.
Cobham was however no peacenik; he was a Field Marshall who fought in numerous engagements in the war of the Spanish succession, including the Battle of Malplaquet.
Walk inside the temple and you will see that this is not a temple to peace at all. Around the walls of the sanctum are sixteen medallions representing British victories in the Seven Years war: Quiberon Bay, Pondicherry, Montreal, et al..
In fact, its full name is the Temple of Concord and Victory. For what Cobham’s heir, the appropriately named Earl Temple, was celebrating was indeed peace – the British Peace, as set out in the 1763 Treat of Paris.
This British peace followed a near total victory, perhaps the most dramatic victory in British history. And he had every right to celebrate for this victory was for him the product of something of a family project: the Patriotic Whigs. Temple’s brother-in-law was William Pitt the Elder, and his four brothers were variously prime ministers, ministers, and MPs.
Everyone wants peace, even a family so successful in war. Even Napoleon occasionally looked like he might sit on his winnings and declare peace. Everyone, including the simpering fool, wants peace. The thing is to have peace on your terms, or at least as Richard Nixon put it: “peace with honour’”.
Which brings me onto the Conservative leadership contest.
For now, we have six leadership hopefuls. From the little any of them have said so far, they are agreed about several things. The party should unite, should aim to get back into power, should move on from personalities, and show competence. (Presumably they also all agree that they are the one to declare peace and unite the party before moving on to reclaim the ministerial cars and offices to which so many Tories had become accustomed.)
This analysis – that all the Conservatives need to do is declare internal peace, stop fighting, and unite – is fundamentally flawed. There is (or should be) a battle of ideas raging within the Conservative Party.
Such a battle needs to be won – and, thus, needs to be fought. Peace before victory, unity before the party knows what to unite around, is a recipe for irrelevance. Graveyards are peaceful; the party could unite and die without having the discussions needed to realise how it can regain life.
We should not unite in some comfortable belief that if we keep quiet somehow it will be our turn again to return to office next time. We need ideas, we need to have the discussion as to why we lost, to work out why the British people rejected us and try and regain their trust.
We need to accept that the Conservative Party is split. Roughly a third is traditionally Conservative: low tax, low immigration, strong defence, law and order etc.
Another third, including the majority of the front bench, is technocratic, suffering Red Box withdrawal symptoms, conditioned to follow their permanent secretaries and the apparatus of technocracy – the OBR, Treasury orthodoxy, the ECHR, and the various Blairite laws that empowered quangos and courts to make the majority of substantial decisions.
The remaining third are the mushy middle, careerists of no fixed or strong views or intellect (or, as they would see it, ‘sensible centrists’), tacking with the prevailing political winds.
This is the party of David Cameron and his candidates’ department, the party of second-rate managerialism. The politics of the human resources department, the Conservative Party as just another government department or utility provider, there to provide political careers for the right type of people. To unite around that settlement would be to accept death.
Rejecting the comfy analysis is first action in the long road back to power. The British people do not want platitudes. They want a Conservative Party that believes in something – and that something (Conservative values) is something they, by and large, share.
But this is not what we have given them over the last 14 years. We went against the grain of their beliefs. We promised time after time to reduce migration, but did the opposite. We promised to sort out the asylum system by tackling the Human Rights Act, but didn’t have the stomach for it.
We promised a bonfire of red tape and quangos, but the Tory red tape factory would have revitalised the Lancastrian textile industry. We promised to reduce taxes, but put them up. We talked about infrastructure and high skilled jobs – but when it came to it, in 2010, we cut capital expenditure. We talked about defence, while cutting the Army and Navy.
So, when it comes to the leadership contest, let’s see fewer woolly calls for unity and more ideas. We cannot drift on until 2029 and then promise again to leave the ECHR and cut tax and immigration – the voters will not believe us, our own MPs and ministers won’t believe it either.
Only by having the battle of ideas and winning it can we move on and look as if we actually believe in something. We shall of course need a Tory Temple of Concorde and Victory, in time. But only after we have won the five year war of ideas – and laid the groundwork for a worthwhile, honourable peace.
